I guess I am being thick here but how does the freight charge bit work? You pay (say) $500 to the freight company and then it doesn’t get paid back? I would refuse to pay it, but I can’t see the benefit to the scammer.
Same as the cashier’s check scam
The guy owes me $500, I charge his credit card $700 and give the trucking company $200. A few days/weeks later the credit card charge is reversed and I’m out the $200 that I already handed over (plus any product that I may have had ready for him.
This was so long ago I don’t remember or stopped before we got to how payment would get to the trucker. If they wanted me to wire it to them, that would be it, I’d never hear from them again. If I was actually to hand it to the driver, I’d be out all the product as well.
Part of what struck me about this is that they were willing to pay more than double the original cost to have something delivered to them hours away when they probably could have just ordered it locally and picked it up.
IIRC, I may have wrote a thread about it when it happened. I’ll have to see if I can dig it up later and look at the details.
If you google TTY scam, you’ll find plenty of warnings about it. Like I said, it’s the same as the cashier’s check scam, but aimed at businesses.
Here’s an update - I emailed the buyer with glider-specific questions and got a reply saying, basically, “Give me a call”. I emailed back saying that I had a bad feeling and if he didn’t want to allow me to confirm his identity I was going to pass. I also made it clear that I was not going to get involved with paying the shipper in any way. My thought process was ‘He doesn’t want a written record of what’s going on and schmoozers are at their best when talking. It hard to pressure someone in an email’. Lo and behold, I got a return email from a major corporate address, a link to a technical article he published and answers to questions I didn’t even ask but had researched (e.g. - his cell phone number came back to him but in a different state and he told me, independently, that’s where he was from). It seems the glider is going to be modified and used in some sort of research but he couldn’t go beyond that - non-disclosure blah, blah, blah, but it makes sense. His technical background is perfectly consistent with what he is saying. I responded back to the corporate address and it went through. The major corporation is going to handle the shipping with their own shipping department. Amazon and my bank confirmed that, provided the payment to Amazon is made with a credit or debit card, the funds would be available to me instantly. He claims to go the corporate check route would take 5-6 weeks and time is of the essence. This is the only thing that gives me pause. Final shipping details are being ironed out but I am almost certain this is not a scam. Its way too much for a scammer to go through and to what end? Steal my 45 year old glider from me that has no practical use to 99.99% of the world’s population? Its not like there’s a black market for these things. When the corporate truck shows up I’ll know for sure, tell him to send the funds and help load the truck. I’ll keep you posted.
I think at this point, it sounds like the real thing. If it’s a scam, it’s at the level of “Oceans 11” and will make a great story even if you get taken.
If it was a scam, the scam wouldn’t be about the glider - it would be about some weird way of parting you with your own cash, and it sounds like that’s not occurreing.
Scam buyers want:
[ol]
[li]easily-resaleable goods such as laptops, cameras, phones, jewellery (yours isn’t any of these)[/li][li]to engineer the payment situation so that you part with some cash, supposedly getting it back via a different route, which then evaporates[/li][li](less commonly) your identity details so they can use your identity as part of another scam[/li][/ol]
I concur.
I once used Craigslist to get rid of some large, high-ish value items before I moved across country. I specified local buyers only.
I got rid of several items quickly and easily. The buyers came, saw what they liked, and gave me cash to take the items there and then.
I only had one genuine scammer, who did the whole I’ll-send-you-a-cashier’s-check-and-you-can-send-me-the-overage-and-ship-the-item scam. I simply replied that I was interested in local purchasers only. A week later, he emailed and asked where his change was from his check. I replied that 1) local buyers only, and 2) I’d received no check. No further word from him.
The last item was an upright piano. I’d gotten it for free, but had had to pay a mover $200 to get it to my house. I was selling it for $100. Some guy came to look at it, and said he wanted it. I asked for a mere $15 to hold it in case any other buyers wanted to look at it. He wrote me a local check, then left. He would call me when he was ready to pick it up.
A week went by, and I was all packed up to leave in about 4 days. I tried calling him and emailing him to ask when he was coming for the piano. The number was disconnected, and there were no email replies. I looked at the check, and it was valid (not a demo check or anything like that). I took it directly to a branch of his bank, and they cashed it. I kept looking on email for him to reply about the piano pickup, but nothing came. I ended up moving and leaving the piano, but with his $15 deposit. (No other buyers responded, so I wasn’t pissed that I’d passed over any other interested parties.)
If you’re worried I’d go through an escrow service. Common when buying cars from across the country and having them delivered. Google has lots of good articles hosted on car websites.
For that amount of money it would be cash on collection or BACS transfer. Otherwise FRO.
This is not good advice in general.
The problem is that a fraudulent transfer won’t be noticed in a week. Funds “clearing” just means that there really is an account and it had money and the transfer went through. But there’s no proof that the person initiating the transfer had the authority to do so. That kind of thing takes (potentially) many weeks or even months.
If someone steals your bank login and makes some transfers, you might not notice it for a few weeks or even a month or two. Maybe not until checks start bouncing or you get around to reading your statement. At that point, those transfers will be rolled back. And the real deadline for when they can be reversed is something like 90 days.
If you don’t trust your counterparty in a transaction, you should only accept cash or cash equivalents.
That said, I agree with the general consensus that this case doesn’t really look like a scam, so it might be reasonable to not worry as much.
The only gotcha I can see is if he had managed to hack say, joe.smith@acme.com’s corporate email and thus was impersonating him. I would also call the company’s office line and ask for that particular person Joe Smith, and verify over the phone. After all, once you’ve hacked a person’s corporate email, it should be trivial to pretend to be them as long as you control all contacts and insist on doing business on your “personal cellphone”. you could even set a “forward and delete” rule so the hacked person would not realize that someone else was sharing their email.
This is why emails form PayPal, etc. never have “click here to login” links. If they want you to login, you do it all, from typing the http yourself. You initiate the contact through publicly published contact mechanism to be sure there is no monkey business.
(We found a hacker had somehow installed “forward all email” rule on one corporate account. Oddly, just the one mailbox; nobody else. No indication they’d had file or remote login ability, so all we could think was they’d somehow used a flaw in the email system to make the person click on something that created the rule. We caught it when the user got constant delivery failures, the email address on gmail was cancelled (Presume someone else had discovered the same hack?).
The information appeared to have been used to attempt the “Urgent: please pay this customer by wire transfer” scam. Which didn’t work because the business doesn’t use wire transfer and the organization was small, the Finance person was in the office beside the boss. But they also used it to try to get their customers with the “please pay this invoice by wire transfer - our accounting system is down…”)
Death is a scam.
Well, the deal fell through. He sent the money and told me to stand by while he arranged shipping. In the end he couldn’t get it shipped at a reasonable cost and asked for his money back. He agreed to pay the fees (about 3%) for all transactions and I gladly sent his his loot back. It made for an interesting couple of days.
Hopefully this is all on the up and up because that’s literally (with a small twist) exactly the scam you/we were worried about.
Here’s a ton of money
Keep some for yourself.
Send the rest back to me.
I’m not sure it works with credit cards (or checking accounts) and pay pal, but if it does, you’re out $300 and he’s up $9700.
How did you send the money back?
So, and I’m genuinely curious, what is a good way? If someone writes a check or uses a credit/debit card, the same situation applies. It could go weeks or months before the person notices the missing money and calls the bank about it. Cashiers Checks and Money Orders can be faked, as we know from the common craigslist scam.
You could ask to meet at their bank and have them withdraw the money in front of you and hand it to you, but that’s going to be too much work for many buyers. If I was buying a car on Craigslist, unless that’s ‘just the way things work’, I’d probably move on to the next seller if they wanted me to go through all that.
OTOH, sometimes I think about selling my motorcycle on CL and I’ve always been curious how to go about collecting that much money without getting ripped off.
This sounds like it the setup for a scam. He sends you money by fraudulent or reversible means. He then asks you to refund good money to him, and then he leaves you stuck with the loss of his original payment. In your case, given the buyer’s particular knowledge of an interest in your specialty item, I’m more inclined to think it isn’t a scam but here is the point where I’d worry. I would not even contemplate sending him a nickel until my bank confirmed there is no way for you to eat the loss on the payment.
Second, in my view, you don’t owe him anything. He bought it. His shipping costs are his problem. You are entitled to the benefit of your bargain. If you want to be nice, you can offer to resell it for him if he will pay your advertising, storage, and other costs. He gets to decide how much or how little he is willing to accept. I would not be that nice. I would have given him a pick up deadline when I sold it. If you haven’t already done that, give him a reasonable deadline now.
You “sent his loot back”? Are you veeeery sure you had the loot to send back? Very sure? If so, it’s an honest, but disappointing, transaction. If not, you just got screwed.
The freight company person IS the scammer or his accomplice. Thus they walk away with the $500 which is the whole point of the scam.
The rest of the transaction is irrelevant, they just want that cash.
For a potential $10k payout on the fraudulent return that covers alot of cheap rent.