Scam Email: Richard Marrino

Here is another person, this time an art dealer, who trusted their instincts and looked up as much as they could about the person before sending any product or money. It had a lot of flags and he caught them all. The lesson for today? Trust your instincts and if it doesn't feel right - google it. Google the name, the email, look at the full headers and you can look up the originating IP and see where it is located. Notice he looked up the shipping company as well (at this point ANY email that mentions using their third-party shipping company is going to be totally suspect to me!).

Here is the message sent to me just now:

I'm an art dealer in New York and have just wasted about a week of negotiations on a supposed sale, that has turned out to be a scam I'm sure.

I did a google map search on the 'client's' address - turns out to be an airport. I did a google map search on the courier, turns out to be a residential address in the UK.

I also did an IP search on the emails, both of which were located in isolated places, nowhere near where the 'client' or 'courier' are located.

Only after these red flags did I do a google for art scams. Thanks for the additional information and confirming my worse fears - fortunately before I acted on any payments etc.

Perpetrators name: Richard Marrino: [richardmarrino@rocketmail.com]

The courier name: Techie Courier