And, so far, the person/?company? never responded again - perhaps
>they got the hint from "we offer this answer and response only once".
>
> Has anyone posting in this NG seen anything like this, and how often?
I fairly regularly get "We'd like to order some of your products" spam email, somewhat similar to this, although I have not seen the "preferred shipping company" angle before. They're amusing in that they're being sent to a personal email address - I'm not a manufacturer or a seller of goods, except on a purely personal level, and I don't have the "catalog" that many of the scammers refer to want to order from.
As I understand it:
- Scammers use this sort of approach to acquire goods, which are either popular or of high value and can be resold profitably.
- Any financial instrument you accept in payment of a scam like this is very likely to be fraudulent - stolen MC/VISA card(s) or numbers, bogus "cashier's checks", etc.
- The scammer may "accidentally" overpay you (with e.g. a bogus check) and ask you to refund the overpayment.
- By the time the victim learns that the payment was fraudulent (and that they're being back-billed by the credit card company, or their bank is reversing the deposit for a check which bounced) the "purchased" goods are long gone and are impossible to recover. Ditto for any "refund" of any "overpayment".
- I would suspect that the "preferred shipper" is a party to the scam... the idea being that *you* pay for the "shipping" out of the (fraudulent) payment you received from the scammer. Even if the scammed goods never arrive in the scammer's hands, they've already gotten cash-or-equivalent from the "shipping payment", and when you try to get a refund from the "shipper" they are nowhere to be found, or simply deny the refund because they "did ship as agreed".