'We'll pay you back' credit scam

[Taro Toporific]

I'd gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.
'We'll pay you back' credit scams target loan-seekers(Mainichi Shimbun, Japan, Aug. 20, 2004)
A new type of fraud in which money brokers are telling customers to buy expensive products to "test their credit limit," but only pay them back part of the cost of the goods is becoming rampant, Tokyo officials have announced.
... a 50-year-old woman from Ome, Tokyo, applied for a 600,000 yen loan from Minato-ku moneylender I-Planning in November 2003 in order to bring all her other loans together.
The firm told the woman to buy three computers in Tokyo's electrical district of Akihabara with her credit card under the pretext of finding out her credit limit, saying it would buy back the goods from her. The women bought the computers for about 690,000 yen and had them sent to the firm, but the firm only paid the woman 75,000 yen for them, and didn't give her a loan.
When she asked the company about the loan, the firm said her details were "under examination."

[amdg]

Umm, we need to test your credit limit by getting you to buy stuff....

A plan so cunning it could fool a fox who graduated with a first from the school of clever schemes at Oxford. (or something like that c/o blackadder)

OK I can imagine one or two old dotty grandmothers being suckered, but they say this scheme is "rampant"? WTF?

[cstaylor]

A sucker born every minute.