Seller beware
If you’ve ever sold or attempted to sell a big-ticket item over the internet, chances are you’ve been contacted by would-be scammers. They seem to especially target people offering cars for sale, but any item over a few hundred dollars might be enough to whet their appetite. The scam emails usually have 3 things in common:
1. They want to pay you more money than what you’ve listed the price at using a check or money order.
2. The buyer is either not local, or purports to be local but is “buying for [insert relative or friend] from [insert non-local area]“.
3. They have poor grammar and a complicated story.
If you see ANY of those things, run. Don’t respond to the email, and absolutely don’t sell the item to that person, because the reality usually goes like this:
You’re contacted by Mr. Proper Britishname from London (who, strangely, can’t write worth beans or spell correctly, and doesn’t sound the least bit British otherwise) who would dearly love to buy your non-running 1972 Gremlin for $4000 instead of $400. But, he wants to send you a cashier’s check for $9000 due to some long-winded reason, and he would like you to keep an extra $1000 for your trouble and send the rest back to him.
What will really happen is that you’ll deposit the cashier’s check, send him the rest of his money back, and about 10 days later your account will be severely overdrawn because the cashier’s check will have been a fake. You’ll owe the bank thousands of dollars, and will never hear from the “buyer” again. (See this craigslist post on avoiding scams and fraud for more details.)
It’s getting to the point where at least one bank is now leery of accepting cashier’s checks drawn on other, perfectly legitimate institutions in the same city. I made a withdrawl from my credit union recently, and they gave me a cashier’s check for the amount, which I took immediately to the bank. The bank questioned me about it: Did I know the person that gave it to me? (Yes, myself.) Where did it come from? (My savings account.)
Usually I just trash the scam-mails, but the one I got today disturbed me. (I’m trying to sell some earrings.) Here it is, exactly as I received it:
My name is Mary and i am a collector of Fashion
accessories,i will
like to have this item and also confirm if i can
arrange for pick up.
Please include this instructions in your next mail.
Also do you accept
checks cos i can have one sent to you by Monday.
Please mail me
Only female seller should respond….
Thanks
“Only female seller should respond”?! There’s one more buyer I won’t be contacting! (And that one is disturbing enough that I’ll forward it on to the site it was from.)
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