London hotel scam requesting money?

100% scam, you are correct.

There is no friend robbed and stranded on vacation.

There is only a scammer trying to steal your hard-earned money.

You friend responded to a phishing email and gave the scammer his/her email address and password. He/she needs to immediately change their email password, change all the security questions and email everyone on their email list and warn them of this type of scam.

The next email has demanded cash be send via Western Union or moneygram.

Western Union and moneygram do not verify anything on the form the sender fills out, not the name, not the street address, not the country, not even the gender of the receiver, it all means absolutely nothing. The clerk will not bother to check ID and will simply hand off your cash to whomever walks in the door with the MTCN# and question/answer. Neither company will tell the sender who picked up the cash, at what store location or even in what country your money walked out the door. Neither company has any kind of refund policy, money sent is money gone forever.

Now that you have responded to a scammer, you are on his 'potential sucker' list, he will try again to separate you from your cash. He will send you more emails from his other free email addresses using another of his fake names with all kinds of stories of great jobs, lottery winnings, millions in the bank and desperate, lonely, sexy singles. He will sell your email address to all his scamming buddies who will also send you dozens of fake emails all with the exact same goal, you sending them your cash via Western Union or moneygram.

Do you know how to check the header of a received email? If not, you could google for information. Being able to read the header to determine the geographic location an email originated from will help you weed out the most obvious scams and scammers. Then delete and block that scammer. Don't bother to tell him that you know he is a scammer, it isn't worth your effort. He has one job in life, convincing victims to send him their hard-earned cash.

Whenever suspicious or just plain curious, google everything, website addresses, names used, companies mentioned, phone numbers given, all email addresses, even sentences from the emails as you might be unpleasantly surprised at what you find already posted online. You can also post/ask here and every scam-warner-anti-fraud-busting site you can find before taking a chance and losing money to a scammer.

If you google "stranded on vacation scam", "London robbed fraud Western Union" or something similar, you will find hundreds of posts of victims and near-victims of this type of scam.

Under no circumstances whatever can any person from outside the European Union obtain a legal job in the hotel industry in the UK, unless it was an extremely senior position in the management of a hotel chain and they transferred from a position abroad with the same company - certainly not for entry level positions as described in that advert, all the unemployed people in the UK and the rest of the EU have priority for any vacancy. The +4470.... telephone number is a 100% cast-iron-guarantee that the "job offer" is a scam, since although it looks like it is in the UK, it can in fact be redirected anywhere in the world, and a call will probably be answered in Nigeria or another West African country. If you gave them your CV, photo, and signature, I'd guess that there is a fair likelihood that your identity will be stolen and misused for various nefarious purposes. You should report this to your local police.

It happens all the time. It's not from your friend --- your friend either fell for a phishing scam, remote access scam or had their account hacked.

You need to call your friend ASAP and tell him/her that their account was hacked. This happened to a friend of mine. I knew she wasn't in London because I live in London. She had no idea how a hacker took over her account but she had so many people calling her to ask her about it

Since your friend probably can't get their email back since the scammer has changed the password, she can post her status on facebook, myspace, text message, etc that she is fine and that her account is hacked - and to let everyone know she is not in London and does not need money

She also then needs to contact her email service to report this so hopefully they can get her account back. If she had any bank statements, credit card statements, etc in her Inbox she needs to call her bank, credit card company, etc ASAP to report that her privacy has been compromised and to freeze her accounts

If this were real, all your friend would have to do is walk into the US Embassy and go to the American Citizens Services office and they would help her. They would also get her credit card company to issue a new card to her and send it overnight through FedEx,

Now you can trace almost every scam at http://scampond.com,/ thousands of scam cases are there. I found it helpful.