I am just starting out my cake business. I'm not even officially licensed until I meet tomorrow with the Health Inspector. I am just setting up my website and e-mail and I have ordered business cards. But the last two days I have gotten weird requests in my e-mail for large orders of cupcakes and they ask for me to give them a total so I can charge their credit card. I know it is a fake request but I wonder how they got my e-mail and what is the purpose of these fake requests? How does it benefit them at all? It is really weird as I am not even officially a business yet. Anyone else get these?

The scam engines send you a message to see if it is a legitimate email address. They search for combinations of letters on a daily basis like "cake" or "bake". There is nothing that you did to get this first message...and you should mark it as spam (rather than just deleting).

I get them, too and do as BakingIrene suggested and mark them as "spam".

I've gotten them and so has a wholesale baker at my kitchen. Total scam. They want 500 cupcakes for an upcoming event and they'll send a "private carrier" to pick them up. Mine said they couldn't call because they recently had eye surgery and couldn't use the phone. Hmmmm?????? I don't know how they benefit either.

http://cakecentral.com/cake-decorating-ftopic-740975-0.html

Wow, I just read the other thread. Scammers are getting very creative these days. So weird.

We have received 3 different emails this week alone. All for 250 cupcakes for uncle wedding oct 10th pick up by cooling van Spelling and grammer are very bad we even told them we needed their credit card up front to run through our local police dept and he said ok need total now

More PC's are being sold on the promise that "you can earn $5000 a month working from home" in countries that formerly restricted email access.

So we will continue to see this stuff. Another reason to blame Facebook for encouraging unverifiable online business--that's where the spammers are getting their ideas.

http://acaketorememberva.blogspot.com/2012/05/cake-scams-can-be-fun.html

That's great! I didn't really understand how they got money out of a person but I think I get it now. I used to work at a bank so I have heard all kinds of fraud stories but this was a new one for me.