possible scam email inquiries

About every week I get an email inquiry usually titled "ad placing" or something similar. Almost every one of them reads as follows:

Hello, I am xxxxxxx xxxxxxxx i will like to place an advert on your station for my two English Bulldogs for adoption for 5 days 8 spots each day,below is the advert description:
Adorable two English Bulldogs for adoption they are house broken current in all shots good around other pets and children,you will love this puppies as they will become your sweet babies and companion if you think you can creat a good home for this puppies please contact xxxxxxx at [email protected] again that is [email protected]
You can please email me back with the total cost to run this advert for 8 times a day for five days in all your station so that i can email you my credit card details for charges today.

All have either a gmail or hotmail account and are almost identical. What possible scam could this be? They already have my email address. I have never responded to one of these because even the very first one looked fishey. Is everybody getting these? Any thoughts?

I'd share the emails with the Better Business Bureau so they could investigate. IT people could dig into the coding and get an idea where it's coming from. You are smart not to reply. Maybe they need a reply to start some sort of virus.

I received this very e-mail 2 days ago requesting to place ads on my internet station that has been off the air since last September. I thought this was strange since we currently aren't broadcasting. Hopefully we will be soon once we take care of the SoundExchange issues. But I thought it was strange as well that the e-mail didn't come to our normal Sales E-mail address. It came to the e-mail address that Indie band would use to summit music for possible airplay. There is something really strange with this, and I wouldn't touch this with a 100 foot pole.

The BBB won't do anything. Just use some common sense. Who advertises puppies on the radio? Of course it's a scam.

Maybe they are not trying to scan YOU. They want you to run the ads, listeners will call them on the phone and the scammers will get credit card info from the listeners who respond?

Added thought: You would eventually get scammed in that they would maybe legitimately pay you for a short flite of commercials. Then you would agree to a second schedule for which they would find a way to block their credit card so you get nothing.

We got this inquiry. The first credit card they gave us for payment was denied. They gave us another that did get approved. One of our staffers got suspicious and did a google search on this ad. They found that a station in Phoenix had them on the air and the credit card charges got reversed about a month later because it was apparently stolen. We pulled the ad after a day and a half and emailed the client that we needed a bank check or money order to continue. The email got no reply. I also found out that the local address they gave me did not exist. Steer clear.

I got one of these this week. They are definitely odd. I have been trying to figure out
what the real scam is.

There is no doubt that this is a scam, I just can't seem to figure out what it is.

The best I can come up with is that they either stole the information from someone who has
good credit, doesn't use cards much or from someone who has passed away recently, and got
the card without the issuer knowing that person passed on. Most likely someone who did not
use credit for a while due to an illness or lack of need.

They than use you to make a legitimate charge on the account. A radio buy would not be as
suspicious as a $2,000 transaction over a day or two at a liquor store or a strip club or whatever.

The first thing that happened to me was that a stolen card, that I did not know was missing
got over 2 grand charged all at once, something that is out of my usual spending habit. I was
called within hours and noticed the card was missing, and the card was cancelled and I was not
held liable for that charge.

I really think that scam is getting tough these days, so they want to put a charge on the card
with your station to make it look legit. The credit company probably wouldn't see the red flag
right away on that transaction, and then a couple weeks down the line, before the cycle is up,
they charge away.

I thought about the person that passed on because when my Father passed on 5 years ago,
my family was still getting offers in the mail in his name, and phone calls about buying
credit insurance and such. My Mother chose not to close these accounts after she paid them
off because they had all their accounts jointly, and my Mother used her card, and my Father
used his.

Since they were joint accounts, if she would have closed them all suddenly it would lower her
credit score. I'm sure this is not that uncommon.

My best advice is to run away from anything like this, you may not get hurt, I'm quite sure that
someone you don't know will get hurt.

Their are some evil people in this world, that will hurt anyone.

This is another example of having to be very careful, there is a scam born everyday,
and someone that will fall for it.

The very sad part of this is that it is usually the elderly or the people who can least afford
it get taken, and by they time they find out its too late.