Last month, hundreds of internet users from places right across US were done in by a scam perpetrated by a company calling itself The Fairway Lending Group. The company gave a false address and claimed to be operating out of 1699, Wall St., Mt. Prospect.
It was careful to leave out local residents. The scam would have blown apart if any of the locals had found out that it was not occupying the said premises.
The company was especially targeting those with a poor credit rating. It offered a loan that was actually a scam molded on the advance fee type of scams. The scam started when people responded to mails from the company that promised them easy loans. They were then asked for their bank account details presumably for processing of the loan request.
The victims were next asked to make a payment as collateral for the loan. They were asked to make the payments through Western Union money transfer. The amount people paid ranged from $900 to $5000.
Users should have been warned when asked to pay any amount upfront before receiving a loan. Such loan schemes are actually banned in the US and in Canada. Any such loan offer would be illegal if offered in the first place.
Apart from money lost, the victims in this case, might also be exposed to identity theft, having revealed their bank account details to the fraudsters. The thing for them to do would be to either close the account or to give instruction to the bank if possible to temporarily suspend it.
You should not entertain such an offer now if you happen to receive one. Throw them outright as junk mail or better still, pass it onto local law enforcement agencies.
As of now, there is no trace of the company. Local authorities claim to have no clue about their whereabouts. Being an internet based scam, the fraudsters found it easy to hoodwink the police by covering their tracks.