Warning: Moscow-based banknote scam

I recently received an email offering to sell some notes. The email claimed
to be from a Moscow-based auction house. When I sent a reply asking for a
catalog, I was sent a bunch of low-res scans of very valuable notes,
including many French Indo-China specimens and rarities and the Bank of
France 5,000 franc shown above.

When I asked for high-resolution scans, I received the same images merely
converted to 300 dots per inch, not rescanned as instructed. Not that I
found this surprising. After all, the image above was clearly marked
(c)www.cgb.fr all over. This is a web site of a reputable French numismatic
dealer. Obviously this scam artist was too lazy to find clean images of good
notes that he could pass off as his own, or he figured his victims would be
too stupid to notice.

Other red flags are that the scammer¹s email address is from the free
service laposte.net, Google returns no results for the name of the auction
house, and the phone number given is one associated with previously-exposed
dating/marriage scams.

The lesson to be learned here is to deal only with reputable, known dealers,
preferably ones that are long-term members of the International Bank Note
Society or the Professional Currency Dealers Association. Also, if it sounds
too good to be true, it probably is.‹OWL