Hello COULD YOU ALLOW DR PEPPER DRINK ADVERT, CO to put a small Decal sticker on your CAR/TRUCK/Bike and get 400 dollars weekly ? for more details visit and apply
So this is like the third time over the last few years I've received this scam text, and honestly this time around my curiosity got the best of me. I wanted to know how the scam worked, and I was not disappointed.
Just doing my part to mark the sender as unsafe.
Dun know why I'm from New Jersey :D
https://callername.com/6063595280
In any case
So you go to the website and fill out the application. From there they apparently send you a super legit looking check around $2500. You're instructed to cash the check, keep like half for yourself and then send the other half to the decal company that will apply the advert to your car.
Seems legit
Now this is where I was thrown a bit, because most of the sources reporting on this scam simply give the good advice of not cashing the check. They'll tell you don't cash the check... if you do your money will get stolen!
But how???
This was not helpful to me, because I obviously already know it's a scam. What I wanted to know is how cashing the check can somehow get your money stolen. Can they somehow gain access to your bank account just from cashing a check? WTF? If I didn't understand it, it must be a pretty good scam, amirite?
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2013/07/rap-car-wrap-scams?page=23
Finally I found this report from the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) that explains it in detail. Basically even the dumb banks get fooled by the check and clear the funds in advance before realizing the check is fake. The scammers make their money by posing as the decal company that you wire money to. By the time the bank figures out what happened you've spent the money and they'll demand you pay it back.
Wow.
Pretty good scam considering it opens with a text message. Most people know about email scams, but a text about advertising money is a lot more believable to a wider audience. Also the amount of money being dealt with is just low enough to be somewhat credible. Instead of millions we're talking just a few thousand. Nice work, scammers. I'm impressed.
Conclusion
Anyone with any kind of business sense can immediately know something like this is a scam. It's amazing and sad to me that people are so desperate they refuse to put 2 and 2 together and go ahead and believe the lie.
Advertising is all about making money. Do we really expect that putting a decal on our car is going to sell $1600 more Dr. Pepper every month? How much money does Dr. Pepper make selling a single can? 25 cents max? That's 6400 cans of Dr. Pepper a month your decal needs to sell just for them to break even. Get real fellas. Like come on, seriously.
That being said I'm glad I looked into this one because I never realized that you can cash a bad check and then owe the money back later. That's pretty messed up; I thought there would be more consumer protections than that. Guess not. Get wrecked, noobs. Yet another example of how something like that could never happen in the crypto world. Hurrah for immutable blockchains! Let's just pretend for a moment that there aren't a million other types of scams in crypto, shall we? There, that's better.