I got this e-mail today from a fellow military member.

Good morning,

I just wanted to inform you of a type of fraud that occurred to me and could happen to anyone of our KHQ members selling their car.

I recently put my car up for sale on Cars.com. I have all my contact info on there and within a week of the car being on that website I received an email from an interested buyer using the name James Moreland.

James said he was buying the car for his in-law who is going on a business trip so he would handle the sale. He wanted to know a few things about the car and then he said he contacted his in law and that his in law wanted to buy my car and that I should consider my car sold. He said that he was going to send me a cashiers check for $29k and my car is for sale for $21k, from this point I was thinking that this thing was a joke. He tells me that when I receive the check to give the remaining $8k to the shipper who will be in Hawaii shortly. Currently the shipper was in NY doing other business. A week passed and I didn't receive the check and about the time frame the check was supposed to arrive I get an email from James telling me to send the shipper $5,500 for shipping fees and other expenses. I reply back telling him that I was not dumb enough to send the shipper my own money when I haven't even received the $29k check. Here's a little story I told him after he asked me to send $5,500 to the shipper. I told him that if this was fraud I would report him to the Honolulu FBI Fraud Unit that was established after an increase of fraud against military members after the Afghan and Iraq war. I also told him to go to the Honolulu State website if he wanted more info. I think he bought the story since he called me at home around 0400 the next morning. He told me that he didn't want me to send my own money and he thought that the check had arrived.

I received the check in the mail yesterday, it didn't have a return address so it seemed kind of odd to me. The check was for 21k and not 29k, I called the bank this morning to confirm the cashiers check and they informed that it was a fraudulent check.

I guess what these people are really after is the payment that is to be sent for shipping. I also heard of stories where they say there sending a few grand over the amount requested for the car and they want the individual to send them the extra money before the check arrives.

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