Freelance Editors Beware!

A few weeks ago, I received a query about doing some editing for a student named Dependra Santha. It looked like a fairly typical query, complete with two academic papers for me to provide quotes on. I did a quick sample edit on a few pages, provided price quotes for both papers, and the next day Santha gave me the go-ahead to do the work. He/she was attending school in London and would have someone in the States mail me a check for the whole amount. Not my usual procedure (I normally use PayPal and ask for half the fee at the start of the job, with the second half due when the job is complete), but I’ve accepted checks before and it worked out fine. I agreed to the payment arrangement, waited a few days, and then started the edit (there was a tight deadline).

When I was about halfway through the job, I received the check. It was a cashier’s check from a U.S. bank, but it looked fishy. First off, the amount on the check was about $3,400 more than my editing fee. Second, the paper didn’t seem quite right and the watermark looked off. Chagrined, confused, and more than a little ticked off, I contacted the author and was instructed to deposit the check, deduct my fee and an additional $200 for my trouble, and wire the remainder to Santha in London. Yeah, right. The check, the envelope it came in, and a hard copy of the e-mail trail sit in a folder near my desk, just waiting for some righter of Internet wrongs to swoop in, find this “Dependra Santha,” and throttle him/her.

Now, I am not a stupid person. I receive some sort of scam or phishing e-mail at least once a week, and I’m normally onto them right away. Looking back, I suppose I should have been onto this scam sooner, but it did seem like a legitimate job. I only lost about a day of my time, but I understand several other members of the Editorial Freelancers Association were scammed by the same people, and some of them lost money—a lot of money.

I must add that 99 percent of the people I work with are honest. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find that the vast majority of my clients are conscientious about paying me in full and on time. But you still have to keep your guard up, as I’ve just been reminded.

If you have been victimized by this or any other Internet scam, you can report it to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). They might not actually investigate your case, and I doubt if they actually perform throttlings, but at least you will feel like you’ve done something.