I'm skirting around a scam. I know it's a scam. But I'm not sure how.

The details:

I've had someone contact me from far outside of my usual area, asking me to build them a website.

She can't talk on the phone because she says she is hard of hearing.

She evades my questions that ask where she found me.

Her "business" is an online clothing brand, which has absolutely zero footprint online, not registered on companies house, no social media, etc.

She immediately accepted the rough estimate, which I costed WAY higher than I usually would (sketchiness tax).

She wants to pay by credit card asap.

I asked for an address and a business name for the invoice. What I got back was residential and very generic.

And in addition to the above, the language and grammar in the emails were slightly off in a few places.

"What is the name of the machine/merchant service you are going to use to charge my credit card for the upfront deposit and its percentage processing fee?"

I reached out to a chap who works in sales for a web agency and he's had something similar, but couldn't remember the specifics. He - like me - kept it at arm's length, and eventually decided against letting them make any kind of payment.

I'm not going to correspond any further. All the alarm bells have gone off in my head to know this is not worth looking into.

But I'm itching to know... how would this have worked?

Has anyone come across this kind of request before, and if so, what did you do?