Scammed, almost
Well, we were targetted for a scam. We had a very strange photography client contact us in December. The wedding was in Feb, she wanted to place a deposit immediately, price was no option. We wanted details before we signed a contract. She initially said the wedding was to be in Philly, but then she gave us two possible locations in Pittsburgh. She eventually sent us a check (well, we can only assume it was from her, since we weren't planning on receiving a check from anyone else and we got a cashier's check for $6500 in the mail). This raised super red flags, and we checked out the check - well the bank it was drawn on had a notice about fraudulent cashier's checks using a particular routing number (which was the routing number on the check). So we filled out a report with the Internet Crime Complaint Center and our local police. We told the "bride" we had a family emergency and couldn't photograph her wedding and that we hadn't received her deposit and that we would destroy it upon receipt. She had the gall to e-mail us back and ask when we could photograph her wedding. We gave her a perfect out, and she still thinks she can scam us. I'll probably just ignore her, but I really want to tell her - hey, you tried to scam a couple of people with PhDs, we're smarter than you, you should just go away.