When I was working in the USA only 5 years ago we had a check sent to a supplier stolen from the mail. The thieves "washed" the details and made hundreds of copies and filled in the details for $500 and sent them to lottery winners all over the USA. Informing people they had won a Perth (Western Australian lottery) for $100,000. This check was a processing fee, they needed to post it to their bank account, and immediately send an equivalent check for $500 to the "Lottery office" who would then process the claim for the prize.

Now the clues should have been, did you buy a ticket in a lottery in Western Australia? The check is from a company who if I google is a privately held German organization.

Still we had a run of bounced checks on our account. Basically we had security with Bank of America where the check number, payee, amount needed to match a file we maintiained with them, when it didn`t the check should be immediately bounced.

This scam cost us nothing because the banks didn`t follow protocol, but I know many people sent legitimate checks. We estimate the scammers easily made in the hundreds of thousands and it was so lucrative they did it again 6 months later.

We were getting 10 - 15 complaint calls a day. Even had a secretary from a Congressmen`s office call as they had complaints about us!

Common sense isn`t all that common.