And just when we thought we had seen everything, there is always something new that people think of to steal from us. This latest stunt is by a delaware company called Voyager Technologies.
Instead of prepaying for their termination traffic, they offered to provide a letter of credit, which is completely acceptable.

A letter of credit is an instrument from a bank, by which the bank guarantees to pay any amount up to a certain limit on behalf of the debtor, at first demand. The beneficiary of the LOC does not need to demonstrate that the debtor owes them money or ague in any way, but simply state that they would like to draw a certain amount on the letter of credit, and the bank will promptly wire the funds.
Since the bank is potentially liable up to the full amount of the LOC, they generally require the debtor to deposit funds equal to the limit on the LOC into a frozen bank account as collateral.

You can imagine our surprise when Voyager Technologies emailed us a scan from what looked like a letter of credit issued by Bank of America for an amount of $100,000. This is an unusually high amount, since it would mean that Voyager Technologies would have had to deposit $100,000 in cash with the bank as a collateral, which seemed very unlikely for a company we had never heard of before.

They did however make one mistake in this scam: when a bank issues a letter of credit, they usually advise it (another word for "notify" in bank language) to the recipient's bank via SWIFT. Then the recipient's banker calls the recipient to let him know that a letter of credit has been issued to its benefit. This is how the beneficiary can know that the letter of credit is authentic, since anyone could manufacture a "letter from Bank of America" on their computer. I have attached this fake letter for reference.

BOA_LOC_10272009.pdf

When in doubt, always very the information independently, which in this case, would consist in calling Bank of America through an independent phone number (not one provided by the customer, which could be a fake number from an accomplice).