| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | New Scam (or is it?) Thread poster: Javier Moreno Pollarolo
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Nicole Schnell 
United States
Local time: 02:44
English to German
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In memoriam | In general: We are overly conditioned just as Pavlovian dogs | Dec 11, 2011 |
Apparently red flags rise up as soon as terms such as "down payment" are mentioned. Down payments are considered Best Practice for any large project. I offer them and I ask for them.
There is nothing wrong with Western Union. Not everybody on this planet has his / her accounts set up for regular international business.
Pre-Paid cashier's checks apparently are a taboo. Which is completely stupid because they are insured and indeed prepaid, carry signatures by the payer ... See more Apparently red flags rise up as soon as terms such as "down payment" are mentioned. Down payments are considered Best Practice for any large project. I offer them and I ask for them.
There is nothing wrong with Western Union. Not everybody on this planet has his / her accounts set up for regular international business.
Pre-Paid cashier's checks apparently are a taboo. Which is completely stupid because they are insured and indeed prepaid, carry signatures by the payer plus an authorized bank teller, and are plastered with check security features such as watermarks, color-shifting ink and such. Easily forged??!? That's because bank tellers are trained insufficiently. What a beautiful way to ease the path for scammers.
I recently contacted a colleague via the person's ProZ.com profile for editing services in regard to a largish scientific book for a university professor at one of the most prestigious universities in the Western EU, I attached a text sample (marketing/social sciences) already translated by a brilliant GER-ENG translator. This person went into my face in terms of "fraudulence", "Russian habits", "I don't do pornography", "low rates". Have people lost touch with the real world and have turned to cultivating paranoid pathological disorders? This person considered my job offer a fraud!! ▲ Collapse
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Nicole, you are right but the flags I'm trying to raise here are not regarding check forging or Western Union mistrust but flags of desperation and incongruence. Desperation since translators are desperate to get work and they fall for these scams. Incongruence because the scam letter makes a little bit of sense at the beginning, but then you start realizing something's not right.
Read the scammy email I got. West Africa? If so, what country? If you are a teacher in a famous univers... See more Nicole, you are right but the flags I'm trying to raise here are not regarding check forging or Western Union mistrust but flags of desperation and incongruence. Desperation since translators are desperate to get work and they fall for these scams. Incongruence because the scam letter makes a little bit of sense at the beginning, but then you start realizing something's not right.
Read the scammy email I got. West Africa? If so, what country? If you are a teacher in a famous university, why not mention its name? This is weird! But hey, at the very beginning I fell for it since the first email was just a simple question, and I answered it, only to receive later the scam text I am sharing with you.
You are also right about the Pavlov experiment. But in my case I have to be conditioned as protection for my business. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Nicole Schnell
United States
Local time: 02:44
English to German
+ ...
In memoriam | You are right to do so. | Dec 11, 2011 |
Javier Moreno-Pollarolo wrote:
Nicole, you are right but the flags I'm trying to raise here are not regarding check forging or Western Union mistrust but flags of desperation and incongruence. Desperation since translators are desperate to get work and they fall for these scams. Incongruence because the scam letter makes a little bit of sense at the beginning, but then you start realizing something's not right.
Read the scammy email I got. West Africa? If so, what country? If you are a teacher in a famous university, why not mention its name? This is weird! But hey, at the very beginning I fell for it since the first email was just a simple question, and I answered it, only to receive later the scam text I am sharing with you.
You are also right about the Pavlov experiment. But in my case I have to be conditioned as protection for my business.
I wouldn't have replied to the email in the first place. Why? Because of the lower case "I" which is very common among youngsters despite the trigger-happiness in terms of shift-key usage otherwise. We all have to protect our businesses. That is by requesting all necessary information in the first place, such as: Which university? Address? Funding secured by whom? Instead of: "What is the deadline?"
Edited for typo.
[Edited at 2011-12-11 20:21 GMT]
| | | | Thayenga
Germany
Local time: 11:44
Member (2009)
English to German
+ ...
neilmac wrote:
Thayenga wrote:
An American using Pigeon English is always suspicious.
But you can always give them "the bird"!
No seriously, I don't usually call attention to howlers but this one conjured up a nice mental image. I assume you meant "Pidgin English".... (for some of us, US English sometimes falls into this category).
Thank you... I think I had that bird in mind. Needless to say anymore.
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Liviu-Lee Roth
United States
Local time: 05:44
Romanian to English
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| | Thank you very much! | Dec 15, 2011 |
I'll share with my colleagues!
Javier.
| | | | B D Finch
France
Local time: 11:44
French to English
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Nicole Schnell wrote:
neilmac wrote:
I assume you meant "Pidgin English".... (for some of us, US English sometimes falls into this category).
For some of us, this kind of English falls into the category Cockney speech.
Perhaps you don't realise that Cockneys are working-class people born in the East-End of London and Cockney is a particular East-End London dialect and not just uneducated, ungrammatical pidgin. It includes Cockney rhyming slang, which can be quite complex.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockney
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