This is just a head’s up.
I received an e-mail today in which someone wanted to order a flute with me, preferably by “valid credit card”. The fact that it was sent by BCC to me implies that it was also sent to others. The fact that I don’t have a shop implies some odd intentions…
This forum would be one of the few places connecting my personal e-mail address with my interests, so for that reason, this head’s up. (E-mail address is visibible for logged in users, I might turn that off now…)
Not potential, but actual, I’m sure.
Take their deposit, and put them on a 14-year waiting list. 
I received this obviously legit request in an email this AM and of course will follow up on it in hopes of doing business with this individual 
Good Day,
I want to make an order for flutes at your shop. Let me know the types you offer,the price quotations and when it will be ready for pick-up.I would also like to know the mode of payment you do accept since it will be more convenient for me to pay using my valid credit card.Please advice.
Percy smit
I got that, too. I too am hooping for significan bisines
Perhaps we can merge this with the original thread and post there.
https://forums.chiffandfipple.com/t/flutes-order-fraud-email/77025/1
I got that one too. Sorry, Percy, but you got deleted fast.
Yes, done, and combined titles.
Oh got it as well today. I was confused as well.
Isn’t Percy Smith one of the up and coming great Irish Flute players (from Nigeria perhaps. He’s a friend and entertainer to the Nigerian Bank Scammers)? Or perhaps he has the World’s Biggest Case of flute acquisition disorder.
Oh, I dunno. Seems legit to me…
He starts with “Good Day” which, as we all know, is how civilised British persons address one another before taking tiffin or a spot of croquet on the lawn.
“I want to make an order for flutes at your shop. Let me know the types you offer,the price quotations and when it will be ready for pick-up”. Again, nothing surprising there. I’m sure loads of people offer to bulk buy flutes without knowing anything about the ‘types’.
“I would also like to know the mode of payment you do accept since it will be more convenient for me to pay using my valid credit card.Please advice”. See, he even offers to use his valid credit card, rather than one of his many invalid ones. Obviously bona fide.
“Percy smit”. Now, if you can’t trust someone with a 1950s English name like Percy to buy a sh!tload of flutes from you, who can you trust?
m.d.
i got it too; i told him to send me a check. 
but actually, thanks for posting this… i tend to be trusting of people, even if they have bad grammar. i probably would have sent him my paypal address, if he actually requested a specific item. i’m not sure how much trouble he could have caused me with that, but better not to go there…
cheers,
eric
I didn’t get one — should I feel left out?
All I found in my spam filter today was an offer to help settle an estate in Burkina Faso, a winning lottery ticket from Ghana and two offers of marriage (or the like) from Canada (!!!).
Maybe tomorrow…
Best wishes.
Steve
Yes you should! Even I got one from a ‘Percy Smit’.
He had left the ‘h’ off his surname.
How did they cream our emails btw?
I remember getting something like that a while ago; it has long since been deleted but if I remember correctly it was probably the same thing.
Easy enough, some of us have our Email buttons included below our posts, and the HTML that displays the page includes them. For instance, in this thread, in Firefox, use “View->Page Source”, then search (“Edit->Find”) for “mailto:”. Find 'em and strip 'em out.
Crikes.
Should our emails not be better protected?! 
I got one of these too - it’s more creative than
the usual types of spam I get
You can protect it yourself. Under “User control panel” → Board preferences", ensure “Users can contact me by e-mail” is turned off.
It turns out that otherwise all users get to see your e-mail address button – also those not logged in. While it would be nice to make a more fine-grained discrimination, at least turning it off helps.
I must admit, I don’t care who gets my e-mail address. You can’t live in the cyber-world at all, or even the real world, without your e-mail address being shared with many different people every day. It’s on my business cards for instance. Sometimes people pick it up and send you a message. If you’re even half awake, it’s always obvious (well, always has been so far, in my experience) when it’s spam. So delete and delete from deletions, block the spammer, and job done.
I’ve had, so far, including this latest one, three spam messages which have obviously arisen because of my memebership of this site. I suspect that this very small number is because the e-mail addresses aren’t stored in some kind of readable database format - it needs a human to read it. I say I suspect - I’m not technically knowledgeable enough to know whether that’s the case or not. But, if it is in readable database format, I don’t understand why I’ve had so few.
Thankf phipp. I’ve adjusted my account details now.
I guess we should all add Percy Smith as a foe
Well I don’t use the email address for business. I like surfing the internet for fun, rather than checking it for spam.
Many companies send out automated addresses which invariably end up in spam folders, so it’s important to check.
Ridding the world of another Percy Smith type spammer would be in our interests, otherwise you will wake up one morning and find out that this forum has turned out like Fluteland.com which is regularly spammed to the point that the moderators are exhausted from clearing it due to their indifference about email addresses and user privacy.