There are a lot of scammers out there. Suppose you are a print shop, you may be asked to do a print job to ship to some faraway locale as cash on delivery. Good luck getting that cash.

We get asked by potential clients about designing Web sites. Most of the requests are legitimate and there isn’t any doubt that it is a real person at a real company. But recently we got a request for an estimate and much of the information in the request seemed fishy. This doesn’t mean it isn’t legit, but it does make us do a little work to try and determine if it is worth pursuing.

The most recent request came from someone who didn’t provide their real location, very little about themselves and wanted a detailed estimate even though they provide very vague information on what they wanted. I was asked for my personal phone number, even though they had the business number and hadn’t called it.

While I still can’t say if it was truly legitimate or not, the lack of further response tells me that the person asking realized we weren’t going to fall for their scam. So no matter what your business does, be a little careful if you get odd purchase or service requests.