So I’m putting an old MP3 player up for sale on Craigslist… asking $35 for it 'cause it’s pretty outdated… when I get an offer for $50. The offer email never refers to the item in any specific terms:
So I’m scratching my head, wondering why I’m getting such an offer, and who’s in their office at 9PM the day after Thanksgiving, shopping for electronics on Craigslist? I immediately replied saying, “put the cash in my hand and it’s yours”, and I get a reply at 7AM (is this “before i leave office”?):
Now things are getting really spooky. I’m being accused of trying to commit fraud now… but I’m feeling like I’m about to be defrauded! I’m cooking up a response to this email; I’d like to string this “buyer” out a little longer to see where he/she’s going… I’m just dumbfounded as to how someone could stand to gain anything by bilking someone out of some crappy old electronics!
My general feeling is that if I ever get a strange feeling about any buyer or seller, I look somewhere else. It’s not only my right to do so, but it also makes me feel better. I don’t need to stress about about these things and just forgetting about these people is the easiest thing to do.
When in doubt, fall back to the old adage: if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
This is exactly what I was just referring to on another thread. I tried selling an Apple iMac on ebay, asking $300 for it, and I got a similar generic email offering $700. This guy (from Thailand) asked if I could “please bill it to this credit card” and he gave me all of his* credit-card and bank account information.
I never ended up selling it to that guy from Thailand, and now I always make sure to limit my sales to people within North America.
So I agreed to accept the postal money order and asked how the buyer wants to close the deal… I got another email at 7 AM this morning:
I’d really like to find out where I’m shipping this durned thing… what’s with the “prepaid fedex shipping acct?” Seems like overkill for a junky little MP3 player. I’ll shoot back an email saying I’m miles away from the nearest FedEx center and will need to take a bus to get there, see if I can milk “Jenny” for a little more explanation why I have to go through so much trouble.
In the meantime, someone else has responded to my ad and will be bringing cash by my house and picking the item up. Jenny doesn’t have to know about this, though…
Shipping by FedEx avoids mail fraud charges and investigation. A forged USPS money order would be a different matter.
My guess is that they’ll send you the money order by FedEx and th FedEx guy will wait at the door as you drop the MP3 player in a return FedEx envelope. There will be no time for you to take the money order to the post office to verify if it is good or not.
Writing as someone whose daytime job is primarily detecting and combating fraud, I’d say don’t get involved. I could pick up half a dozen clearly identifiable risk actors from the original email, and more from the later ones.
Even if you had a particularly long barge pole, I would not use it to touch this deal. Not even if I were wearing thick rubber gloves.
Is there any proper channel for me to report this scammer? I’ve already reported them to gmail for abusing their terms of service (using an account to collect personal information from others). Anything else I can do? I don’t want to just turn my back while other people may be defrauded by this louse.
You could try contacting the local postal inspector since the guy is obviously going to try to pay using a forged postal money order. You could also try contacting FedEx since he is going to use them as the middleman. But somehow I doubt that FedEx will be that interested.
Also contact craigslist and ebay about it with as much information as you can. They have a huge stake in combating this because it gives buying and selling online using their services a bad name, and that considerably affects their bottom line.
