We just found out how this scam worked. Very clever.

The prospective buyer of the boat, supposedly in Belgium, got our account number from us so he could wire money directly into our account.

Then someone locally went to our bank with a phoney check supposedly from some insurance company settling a non-existent claim and deposited the phoney check for $12,000 into our account.

Then he e-mails telling us the wire transfer money (supposedly $1,200) will be in our account on this date.

Sure enough, the money is in our account, but $12,000 instead of $1,200.

We e-mail the "buyer" and tell him about the mistake, and he apologizes and asks us to send back the $10,800 overage.

When we talked to our bank about it, since we had told them it was a wire transfer, they said, "Yes, it's there and good as cash."

But now the bank has checked and found out there was NO wire transfer to our bank -- that it was a fraudulent check that was deposited.

I guess the moral to this is to never give your account number to anybody. Interesting, because occasionally we have given our deposit slips to people just because it has our phone number and address, and we figured what's the difference if they know our account number -- all they can do with it is put money into our account.

Now we know that somebody putting money into your account is not necessarily a good thing.

What's creepy about it is that this was done by somebody in the Keys who walked into our local bank. I hope they catch the perpetrators.