Charlene Thornton, Special Agent-in-Charge of the Honolulu office of FBI, states that the scam started when a law company got a fraudulent e-mail claiming to have come from someone in a foreign country seeking the company's services, as reported by Starbulletin on February 22, 2010.

Furthermore, a check is attached to the e-mail that seems to be an advance fee from the client to the law firm. Curiously, the fee amount sent is much larger than the industry rates. On mentioning about the 'excess payment' to the client, the law firm gets another e-mail from the scammer (so-called client) requesting to send the refund through wire-transfer to an overseas account.

But soon the law company finds that the check it received is actually false. The bank accounts involved are located in Canada, Taiwan and South Korea, but these possibly are nothing but "relay accounts." Moreover, these accounts are potentially created to be the initial deposit places for the money from where the sum is transferred to other regions.

The FBI states that it has observed variations of this scheme. Earlier counterfeit checks concentrated on victims making sales on Craiglist, a communities' network that facilitates online classified ads, free of cost.

However, it is the first instance when online scammers have specifically targeted the legal community of Honolulu through an e-mail fraud. This is the observation of the FBI after conducting legal investigation. The finding indicates that by increasingly executing targeted e-mail attacks, online fraudsters are bringing about variations in their schemes.

In view of the latest, highly sophisticated e-mail scam, the FBI has cautioned all legal companies and the associated professionals to remain vigilant while handling clients who approach them online. Besides, they shouldn't send any wire-transfers as refunds to clients till the time the first fee payment is fully cleared.

Meanwhile, the Honolulu FBI together with FBI staff of the US embassies in other countries and law enforcement officials overseas is working to track the culprits of ongoing Internet scam.