Public Service Announcement

New guy, old scam. This guy "Paul James" (no doubt fake) has been trolling DigitSmith for a slick removal of your hard earned lettuce. He used a company name of the return address of the Priority Mail envelopes: Gerald Thoubburon LLC, 8000 Central Avenue unit 10, Phoenix AZ 85020-3699. All communication was by e-mail and US mail only.

The deal is is this: they send a fake check for an amount more than the requested deposit on a piece of used machinery, you get the fake check and deposit it while the check is at the bank being processed, they needle you to wire out the overage to their freight company, agent, technician etc. In our case this Einstein sent us two bogus checks on the same day in separate envelopes (heavy stoner I would guess), these were for $7,500 and he wanted to put $5,000 down on a I Image that I have for sale, then I was supposed to wire $2,500 to his "agent" to pay for him to cover his travel and per Diem to inspect the machine prior to finalizing the deal.

Bunch of red flags with this dope:
Two checks with the same check number that didn't look the same
Mailing address was Arizona and checks were drawn on an Alaska bank (must take a while to get your deposit to the bank)
Refused to give us company information to invoice him for a $50,000 piece of machinery
No phone number was provided
He didn't ask where to the inspect the machine or where we would be shipping from
I was told to pick one check and shred the other one, he said they were both good checks

I have a very humorous e-mail chain from this knucklehead that I should post (I may save it for later update). However I did end up asking if he would like my SSN & DOB, I think he may figured the "the jig is up" at this point. If not then, possibly when I asked if he could "house sit" when I am vacation or get the carbon out of my Ferrari's engine. We had a good time with this scammer.