I think in this case, the fact that English is not her first language worked against her. The slightly-off phrasings probably didn’t set off her alarm bells, and without that seemingly obvious warning, she also missed the fact that he didn’t actually name anything she was selling.
I didn’t catch that she was ESL – was that in the OP somewhere? If that’s the case, I would give a pass, but honestly, I can tell you that at least half the people with whom I work – for whom English is their first (and only) language – would have fallen for something similar.
That’s very true – though I think it’s actually the message from the shipping company (supposedly a UK company) that was trickier for her.
She’s quite fluent when it comes to reading and editing English, so I believe she certainly noticed the awfulness of the original message from Antonio – but she could’ve brushed that aside as being a guy from Taiwan. (Although he did say he was actually from the U.S…) But the allegedly British shipping company customer service message has that typical “we’re Nigerian but pretending to be English” off-sounding flavor, which is fairly easy to spot for a native English-speaker but not so much for an ESL-er.
Not in the OP, but in my second post I mentioned this. You can kinda tell she’s Russian … she has a tendency to drop articles like “the” and “a.”
Yeah, really, the moment a so-called bookseller asks you to pay $3,000 for books he’s never heard of, and without giving you a phone number or the name of his alleged store, you should start hearing some serious warning bells.