Friday, November 14, 2008

We Won't Get Fooled Again . . . We Hope!

We received an e-mail Thursday that said:

Dear Sir/Madam, My name is Rev. Larry Clark.i want to order some of your product to one of my new Orphanage home in Ghana.I want to know the types of Loggers,Recorders,data loggers and recorders,Test and Measurement Equipment,controllers and Panel Meters you have or give me your website so that i will select the type of product i want to order please.i live in Florida and i am on a trip now.WHAT TYPE OF PAYMENT DO YOU ACCEPT?Thank you.Rev Larry.

What a great opportunity! A chance to sell some merchandise, and help out a worthy cause in Africa. Who wouldn’t jump at the chance? I responded as we would to any prospective customer, answering his questions promptly and courteously. He asked for 15 loggers. As we corresponded and I attempted to verify payment information and other details, his emails became increasingly more urgent. In addition, he refused to use anything other than his preferred shipping company, P K K shipping, which can be seen in another one of his e-mails here:

Thats good but i have not us that shipping before and i am comfortable with the P K K shipping company thats why i want you to mail them now please.please adviseRev Larrk

As if this weren’t fishy enough already, this part really struck a chord with us (plus, spelling your own name wrong is not helping your cause). No one around here had ever heard of P K K shipping, so we decided to investigate. Our first step was to Google 'P K K Shipping' (not to be confused with a terrorist group called the Kurdish Worker’s Party?) What we found was a huge number of complaints about the scam being run by P K K Shipping. Everyone mentioned the exact same story that Rev. Larry had sent to me about an orphanage in Ghana and traveling in Florida. Many of the people writing about it online said they were baiting him and were going to contact the FBI about him. It's also worth mentioning that I found two real Rev. Larry Clarks, presumably doing God’s work and not trying to conduct Internet scams!

Seeing there was nothing more I could do, I decided to ignore him and move on…until he called. I could barely understand a word he was saying on the phone. I mentioned that I looked up P K K shipping online, and as soon as the word scam came out of my mouth, the phone clicked dead and he disappeared as quickly as he arrived. I’ll always have a place for you in my heart, and I’m sure the police will always have a place in their cell for you my sweet Reverend Larry Clark.

1 comment:

jmlord59 said...

We received a call from Rev. Larry Clark last week wanting to purchase some of our product to ship to Ghana, but he was using a different shipping company, which we can't find anything on. He provided credit card numbers for the purchase, which all processed successfully, and have received the funds. However, after doing some research, we're concerned that the cards might be stolen and the credit card company will come back and debit the funds from our account. We haven't shipped the product or paid his shipper because we don't want to send money out of the country without a better idea of who it is going to. If anybody else is or has dealt with Rev. Larry Clark or International SmartMovers, please contact me. Thank you.