Are You Being Scammed?
Okay, we’re all adults here so we should be able to handle the truth. The truth is that if you get an email saying you’ve won the German Postal Lottery or that somebody in Africa wants to give you millions of dollars, you’d be smart enough to immediately recognize it as a scam. However, I’ve heard about some printers lately who have nearly fallen for an equally unlikely pitch just because it has been posed as a request for proposal — in other words, new business that has come knocking without any effort. Free money.
Yes, I know. In this Internet age, business in no longer restricted to geographic areas. If you have a Web presence, you are open to the whole wide world. But ask yourself, why would a missionary in Ghana or a social worker in Nigeria pick your particular Kansas or Idaho or Mississippi print shop out of the 2,720,000 printing companies that pop up when one Google’s “printing companies.” Is your website that good?
I don’t know of any printer who has actually bitten hook, line, and sinker and lost money on a printing-specific scam, but I bet you there have been some. And for anybody who thinks printers might be an unlikely target for Internet scammers, Google comes up with 1,380,000 hits for “printing scams.”
Now, pardon me while I send my banking information to that nice widow in Rwanda who wants me to launder the $3,576.898 (U.S.) her former husband embezzled from the finance ministry. What could go wrong?
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