Even lawyers fall for scams
 

I'm sure no lawyer on GC would fall for this. :p

Toronto lawyer Gene Colman, who has handled divorce and child-custody cases for 30 years, was immediately intrigued by the e-mail he received out of the blue.
“My name is Liana Chengjie and I am a [sic] contacting your firm in regards to a divorce settlement with my ex husband (Paul Chengjie) who resides in your jurisdiction,” read the e-mail, sent to Mr. Colman’s website (complexfamilylaw.com) last fall.



The woman explained that she was “on assignment in Hong Kong” but was trying to get her ex-spouse to live up to the terms of an out-of-court settlement under which he owed her more than $400,000.
“I thought, ‘this is an interesting case,’” Mr. Colman recalled. “I like interesting cases.”
But the message, as he soon learned when his requests for copies of government-issued identification and a phone conversation were ignored, was a fake – part of a wave of increasingly sophisticated “bad cheque” fraud attempts aimed at lawyers across Canada and the United States.



read the rest here.

I get at least 3 of the emails a week!

what was your reaction to the very first one? i'm thinking that two things would make me suspicious:
1) the fact that they're out of the country
2) no explanation as to why they didn't use the lawyer(s) that helped negotiate their divorce in the first place.

Actually, one of the first things that rings odd to me is the lack of specificity in phrases like "in your jurisdiction." Real people don't talk that way. A real person would say "who resides in Toronto."

I get several of these a week.

Easy to separate the wheat from the chaff here in Oklahoma. We have a real-time public access court docketing system where I can just punch in the litigants' names and see whatever's been filed in their case, whatever's pending and usually have access to images of all of the pleadings.

The Internet Explorer commercials even parody these emails. I used to get them when I was in middle school. It seems fake from the first line haha.

So I guess I'm the only one who doesn't get these. Maybe because I'm new?

I'm with Kevin - maybe because I do only defense, but one of the first things I do is check the public access system to see if suit has actually been filed. I couldn't see myself falling for something like this.

So a couple of days ago?

oh snap