Hey everyone
It seems the "Happy Married Life" cake scammers have modified their act and are targeting caterers/restaurants...please be careful. God knows why they cant get a life and a honest livlihood
Below is an email we recieved from an industry website:

Dear Valued Clients,

It has been brought to our attention that restaurants are being contacted by an individual or individuals who are trying to defraud the restaurant of money. These people are pre booking parties, and paying by money order or cheque. Then they are cancelling the party and asking for "only" half the money back in cash, saying that the restaurant can keep the rest of the money for their inconvenience. Several days later the restaurant finds out that the money order or cheque bounced. Please be careful when dealing with these types of situations. If this happens, please report it to the police, and to MenuPalace.com so that we can make our customers aware of these scams, and prevent the industry form being defrauded.

Sincerely
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gary Lipovetsky
President
MenuPalace.com Corporation

Wow, it takes all kinds...

I don't accept checks or money orders...

Cash or Paypal only!

It should be common sense of business owners to make sure that checks or money orders have cleared before they return any money, but I guess some people don't think about it. Thanks for the heads-up!

This almost happened to me on craigs list. It's everywhere and can happen with anything. It is really sad that you don't know who you can trust anymore.

OK I am confused. How can money orders bounce?

Money Orders can have stop payments placed on them just like checks.

I make sure that I give it time to clear before I do anything. Down payment to hold the date and then full payment well before the cake is due. So if it didnt clear, its considered a non-payment and says right in my contract that I have the right to book someone else and ignore the order if an attempt to rectify it isnt done. I also charge a fee for bounced checks.
You have to C.Y.A. because there is just too many people out there trying to get things for free and screw people over. Its a sad world we live in.

I generally try to cash checks at the customer's bank.

I have read somewhere here about the same scam but using stolen credit cards, of course, you get the money to your account, the one that really has to pay is the original owner of the c.card, or something like that. So sad this people think they deserve to have whatever they want at others expense.

A few years ago a friend of mine sold a decked out 4 x 4 truck on Craig's List. He was paid with a bogus cashiers check. Luckily he had the sense to tell the prospective buyer that he couldn't take possession of the truck until the check cleared. Of course he got a call from the bank, called the police, but the buyer was long gone by then.

Unfortunately these scams have been around for a long time...they're just getting more sophisticated.

Ugh, don't these a-hole wankers have anything better to do?

If they would just use their powers for good actions instead of bad ones! If they would just choose to be Batman instead of The Penguin!