Question: I received an interesting e-mail from Italy. Do you think that it can be true? If yes, can you assist me with this problem? Please see a few parts of the letter below:
“This is to notify you that we have received a payment advice of thirty-five million five hundred U.S. dollars to be accredited to your account, the only alternative is to secure the service of an Italian lawyer who will have to assist you in completing most of the personal and legal papers as required by Italian financial law.”
Answer: If you received this notice letter without any previous dealings with the company, it is most likely untrue. Typically when it is a fraud, the next step is that they recommend an Italian lawyer who can assist you. You will then contact this “lawyer” who is actually simply them or someone impersonating a real lawyer who accepts to assist you under a pre-paid, very convenient flat fee. The method of payment will be a money transfer after which the lawyer will disappear without providing you with the promised assistance.
Studio Legale Metta has already been involved with a matter similar to this one where a third party fraudulently pretended – via internet — to be a partner of the firm and acted in a manner similar to that described above.
Fortunately, we were contacted directly by the suspicious recipient of the letter prior to his transfer of the money. In our case, the impersonation had been done by taking real biographical information from our website and presenting it as theirs with fake contact information, so the recipient’s attempt to be in touch with our offices was routed to the fraudulent party.
Luckily, the recipient did his own internet background searches and found the true contact information for Studio Legale Metta. We reported the case details to the relevant authorities and found that this particular person(s) had committed similar acts in the past.
The basic word of advice in these cases is that if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
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