Free Piano Giveaway Emails

I recently had a customer reach out to me asking for my thoughts about the following email:

My customer then replied to the above email, asking for more details. He received the following reply:

This is a scam. Any email offering a free piano, particularly one of value, is statistically almost certain to be a scam. Most of these emails follow similar patterns, and the piano’s “owner” typically will tell you the piano is currently being handled by a mover or storage company, and that you just need to send them money. There is no piano. You will not see your money again, and they’ll gather your personal information for future attacks.

Nearly all scam emails that people have shared with me have involved deceased family members. Below are a variety of messages I’ve received over the last two years. Hopefully, if you’re received a similar email, one of these will come up in your web search:

Note that these emails often include pictures of the instrument, and these pictures are stripped from Craigslist, Facebook, and other platforms with pianos for sale, such as the one in this post. The pianos are nearly always higher value instruments, worth thousands, in order to activate your sense of lost opportunity.