A few days ago, I got an email supposedly from Ebony Marketing. It looked slick and official, and stated that the company could be verified with the Better Business Bureau. Indeed, the company is listed there, and the address information matched.
The content, however, was very similar to that tired old lottery scam. You were supposed to contact them and they would send you a check. You were supposed to wire this money to them as a “test” of their payment system, keeping a handsome sum for yourself.
You probably can guess what would happen next. If you deposited the check and then wired the the money, the check would turn out to be bad, and you would be stuck paying the bill!
Ebony Marketing is aware of the scam and is investigating, but in the meantime, don’t fall for that tired old trick! Almost every payment system I can think of has a means for testing–Paypal and Authorize.net both have testing servers, in fact, where you can set up your system and do fake transactions to your heart’s content to make sure the system is working correctly and generating the correct mails and so forth.
No reputable company will ask you to “test” Western Union.
Not. Ever.
Don’t fall for it!