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Please help! I’m new to the sugar daddy world and he’s willing to pay me through email by sending me a check? He’s asking for me to provide my full name and email address. Is this fraud or no?

JTP - Apologise to Monica
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Alaïa
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    Can you clarify your question? "Pay me through email by sending me a check" seems contradictory. – JTP - Apologise to Monica Oct 18 '19 at 03:11
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    @JoeTaxpayer I don’t think this needs to be clarified. This is inevitably a scam. – Vicky Oct 18 '19 at 06:15
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    @JoeTaxpayer I'm guessing an image of a cheque to be mobile-deposited (with the words "This is a scam" having been removed using Photoshop). – TripeHound Oct 18 '19 at 06:56
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    Also see https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/115885/got-scammed-by-a-sugar-daddy-looking-for-advice-on-what-to-do-now for a peek into next month. – Robert Longson Oct 18 '19 at 07:29
  • If you're new to the sugar daddy world, do yourself a favour and get out. Now. Nobody gives away money without expecting something in return. Even if the money is really honestly real (which it's probably not,) you can rest assured there is another shoe waiting to drop. Maybe he'll string you along for a few months until you get used to the income and then start making demands on pain of being cut off. – Steve-O Oct 18 '19 at 13:34
  • This might be off-topic on this site, but besides the threat of financial scams you should also be worried about your personal safety and think carefully before you provide your personal information to horny strangers from the Internet. – Philipp Oct 18 '19 at 14:01
  • The check will immediately be followed with "oops, I paid you too much, can you take $X amount out and wire me back"? Since it's a wire transfer or Western Union the bank won't be able to grab it back and you'll be out the money. – Ron Beyer Oct 18 '19 at 15:51

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Yes, this is inevitably a scam. Using cheques for payment these days is incredibly rare and a forged cheque is a classic way to make the recipient think they have money irreversibly in their account, when actually it may be detected as a forgery weeks or months after the deposit when the money has long been spent. The “sugar daddy” will send you the cheque, ask you to deposit it in your account and then ask you to either buy something (from an accomplice) with the money or send some of the money on to someone else. That way they get your (real) money and you are left with their (forged, non-existent) money.

Vicky
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    "Using cheques for payment these days is incredibly rare" Not in the U.S., as can repeatedly seen on this site. – glglgl Oct 18 '19 at 11:45
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    @glglgl I guess it depends on what you mean by "rare." Courtesy of my job, I have a data set of US consumer bank transactions in front of me right now. I think it's safe to say that this data is a more reliable measure of typical behavior than frequency of questions on this site. I just took a look, and for a typical month (September of 2019), about 2.24% of transactions are checks. Personally, I'd consider that pretty rare. – dwizum Oct 18 '19 at 12:22
  • I’d guess low, but not that low. Nice to have that data point. – JTP - Apologise to Monica Oct 18 '19 at 18:30
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    Taking a check is fine if you know you can get hold of the person. Our window cleaner takes checques. He knows exactly where we live. – gnasher729 Oct 19 '19 at 12:52