Potential Scam or Fraud???
Hi,
This is going to be a long post so I can explain the situation thoroughly.
I have been dealing with an international customer for past 23 days or so. She contacted me asking if I would ship to Kazakhstan. I ship all over the world so this wasn't unusual and I have other customers in that region. But, the red flag was raised when she asked if her brother, who is living in Saudi Arabia, could pay for her order using Gift Certificates. I told her that he would still have to use a credit card so why not have him pay for the order instead.
She has been asking very thoughtful questions about the merchandise and she has been very polite and formal in her writing despite the language barrier.
At one point because her brother wasn't following through for her she attempted to pay herself using her own card which she did say wasn't sure would work. It was declined. Finally, two days ago her brother completed the order using his credit card. It was authorized and the batch settled ok.
After her order was complete she immediately sent me an email asking if it had shipped yet. I have avoided shipping her order by asking her detailed questions about her shipping address.
I called authorize.net and they weren't any help. So, in an attempt to find any information on her I looked up her IP address and it is coming from Kazakhstan. I followed her original Google search term and one of my competitors came up first in the search so I called them. They had an email exchange with her and also thought she was thoughtful, but that it was becoming difficult so they told her they couldn't help her. Then, she found me.
Another red flag I have noticed is that her last name is spelled two different ways, but this can be common when trying to translate another language script into English. And, I found an odd post from 2008 that contained her telephone number and email address, but the post was in Russian so I had a friend translate it for me. She thought it was a very strange post.
Her rough translation reads: [customer] asks if business sells yellow sulphur and other chemicals like amonia chloride, urea and other petro-chemical compounds.. and they are interested in long-term cooperation, don't request the full payment because KGB controls their transactions."
The day after the sale she has already filled up another shopping cart full of merchandise.
Does this seem odd to anyone else? Any advice would be greatly appreciated as I've been tormented by this for days!
Thank you!
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