J.P. wrote to the agency: I believe that I am the victim of a fraud attempt. On January 9th 2008, I was contacted by e-mail by a man calling himself Bob Freebury from Orchard Vale Trust. I am a member a translation service and I was contacted for a translation contract which I accepted and completed. Since this was for a charitable organization, we agreed that one of their "donors" would send me a certified cheque for the amount that I quoted for the translation.    I received the latest email this morning and apparently one of the "donors" has sent me a payment for $3800 which exceeds my fee and I'm to contact them once I get it so that they can tell me how to send back the balance. Obviously I'm not going to do that but I don't know what to do from here... p.p.s. Orchard Vale Trust is an actual charitable organization - please see http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk/registeredcharities/showcharity.asp?chyno=326940 The scam involves sending out a stolen or false cheque in the hope that the victim will send the excess back to the scammer before his/her bank bounces the bad cheque. J.P.'s agency replied: We're sorry about this bad experience. You were victim of a Nigerian scam. We've already sent 6 newsletters about these swindlers. As you've seen in the header, this message came from the following IP: 41.219.243.24. If you use Traceroute, you're able to know this message came from a nigerian server which ALWAYS means swindler and crook. route: 41.219.243.0/24 descr: Starcomms Ltd. RESERVED Nigeria origin: AS33776 mnt-routes: MNT-STARCOMMS mnt-by: RIPE-NCC-RPSL-MNT source: RIPE # Filtered This "Bob Freebury" is a well-known nigerian crook. As he know he'll never be caught by local authorities, he uses this name since 2 years at least...