Ministry Reservation Enquiry

If you run a hotel or bed & breakfast you have a whole world of phishy emails just to yourselves.  Today it’s Pastor John Ray who craves “your sense of honesty and sincerity “.  Surely a minister of the cloth isn’t implying that you would tell lies about your room rates.  Or maybe he thinks you might lie about your availablility.  Guests.  Who needs them?  They only create work.

I hope you realise that Pastor John Ray doesn’t exist.  He’s a scammer, after your hard earned cash.  On my spam and phishing blog, I have posted a couple of similar scams where the scammer started to ask for you to pay him for air fares, car hire etc.  I have a cyberfriend named Annie Cheater.  She has replied to Pastor John Ray and will let you know what he wants.

Don’t follow my example and reply.  Just delete the email and don’t reply. 

Dear Sir/Ma,
We write to introduce our Ministry “John Ray”Our main importance of
 sending this mail is to crave your sense of honesty and sincerity with
 respect to this enquiry. We want to enquire from you if you can book an
 accommodation for the Church team who will be arriving  Evangelical 
Program.
 We would be most appreciative if you would be willing to do so.
 Number of Guest:06
 Date of Arrival: 20th Dec 2008
 Date of Departure:30th Dec 2008
 Type of Room: Double Bed
 Persons Per Room: 2
 Number of Rooms: 3
 For prompt action, we would be very grateful, if you can send with the 
total
 cost for of the accommodation to effect the prepayment and the following
 details:
 1. TOTAL COST FOR THE ACCOMMODATION (In $USD Currency)
 2. FULL MAILING/POSTAL ADDRESS OF HOTEL
 3. CONTACT NAME
 4. TELEPHONE NUMBER.
 We would be expecting your prompt response so that we can forward our 
Credit
 Card Details for prepayment.
 Thank you and God Bless,
 Regard
 Pastor John Ray

My cyberfriend Annie has a reply from Pastor Ray.  Here is part of it.  As I thought, they want her to send them 4k Euros for flights!!

For the New booking.The payment is ready but before then, I will like to know if you can render us a favour.

Our clients(DAVID PAUL) have just informed us that we would be responsible for making their flight arrangements to your country.MR DAVID PAUL has given me his credit cards to charge for the full payment of their flight tickets and the hotel booking. But unfortunately, I dont have a credit card machine to do this. I have not gotten a Credit card POS terminal yet. I will have it by ending Jan.
 
 So I would appreciate it if you could charge an extra 4,000 Euro for us via your credit card machine & you can then send it to us via western union money transfer in west africa as usual.