Guy by the name of Ramon Byron emailed me responding from an add i placed in Craigslist for Recording Studio Services he said he has 3 artis that sing country and need my services (Idiot) Were a Hip Hop Recording Studio take that [***] to Nashville, asked for a total and my Bank Merchant, little does he know i am also a skip tracer for a Law/Collections Firm so i did the research on his name and phone number and nothing came up ive been in the music biz for almost 20 yrs and been a skiptracer for 15yrs, sorry Ramon im not the 1.

I am located near Phoenix, AZ and received a text from 775-773-8219 asking if I do music recording and how much I charge and that he has 3 different artists that need my service and if I take credit card payments.  It seemed odd that someone from out of state would not even know if my recording studio does music recording yet make such a commitment as to prepay via CC to send 3 different clients to record albums at my studio sight unseen.  So I did an internet search and found this text is spam at the worst (perhaps to identify who needs CC merchant accounts or at least who is gullible enough to respond to fishing texts like this?) and a scam at the least (I'm not interested enough in finding out how it works to play any games with them here).  If you run the reply text number through Google/Bing, though, you'll see this same text was sent to random studios of all kinds of sizes and specialties in NV, OK, CA, TN, NY, just to name a few, so I feel there is no way they this is legit.  I'm just going to ignore the text and block the number.

Business Scam
Well known business scam.  Generally, it goes like this:
They will text or email you with a fairly large order to get your attention.  Almost all communications will be by text or email (because they are foreigners and English is not their first language which is oft times obvious in the quality of the text or email) and there will be some excuse, such as they are deaf, or sick, or somewhere that doesn't have phone service (then how did the text get out?).  They want to know if you take credit cards, and if so, which ones?  They don't care about the price since it will always seem reasonable or low.  They then tell you that they want to place the order, and have someone pick the order up, who conveniently does not accept credit cards and that is the only way they have a paying right now.  So they will overpay you and tell you to send the difference by untraceable means such as Western Union to this person for them.  Eventually the card they give you will be reversed and you will be out the money and the fees.

Add Colorado to your list... Ya know what they say, "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't."  "Ramon Byron" just tried this scam on me (second time in four years this scam has been tried on my company).

Same scam reached me here in Florida via email; very sketchy.