All right, I know we get a lot of threads like this, but bear with me. I’m selling a handheld video game player on Craigslist. I won it in a drawing, but I’d rather have the money. I’m selling it for $150, which is $50 below its retail price. I just received this response:
The fact that the writer’s style is that of a non-native English speaker, that she wants me to ship it overseas, and that she’s offering $100 more than the asking price for shipping are pinging my scamometer. If she were offering to send me a check, I would reject the offer. But she’s offering a PayPal payment, which to the best of my knowledge is pretty well guaranteed to stay put once it’s in my account. On the other hand, maybe there’s some PayPal Craigslist scam that I’m not aware of. Fellow Dopers, what say you?
Your scam-o-meter shouldn’t be pinging, it should have blown a fuse by now. Offering you more money than you’ve requested, shipping overseas (and always with some prestigious, vague job involved)? I’ve even read the line ‘I want to let you know that i am serious about…’ before!
This particular scam? I think it’s probably a phishing scam, where they send you a bogus confirmation email from Paypal and get you to reveal your account info. Google ‘paypal scams’ and you’ll find a ton more variations.
People file bogus reports with Paypal all the time and get refunds. They say you never sent it or whatever. So they get their money back and the item.
People can protect themselves a bit by not tying the Paypal account to anything else and transferring the money out the second it show up. But then Paypal locks the account, starts annoying you and who knows what else.
It is a bit odd, by scam standards. Most try to avoid the USPS since doing a scam involving them gets into mail fraud which is another level of problems they don’t want. (Hence, a lot of scammers send bad checks via UPS, etc.)
gee…why is this a scam ?
The email clearly says he wants to buy “your item”. And it’s such a good item that he’s paying you extra. Hey, I’ll bet he found your ebay listing by searching for “items”. And now,-- out of all the millions of items out there—, he’s found the best item of all, and he just wants to pay you for it.
Technical question: is this type of email sent by a human, or by automated program?
How hard would it be for the programmer (or typist) to replace the word “item” with the actual product featured in your ebay ad?
I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that it could be a phishing scam. :smack:
I figured I would have some protection against this if I paid for delivery confirmation from the post office, but it would still be a hassle.
I just received another e-mail with essentially the same offer, so I guess I just hadn’t run into this particular scam before. Funny, the second one offered me $120 for “international shipping” to Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
After you’ve dealt with Craigslist for a while, you begin to recognize that Nigerian scam-ese has such unique fingerprints that you don’t even really need to read the message to pick up on it. I’ve often said that if Nigerians even got wise and used American frontmen/women, they’d up their success rate by about ten thousand percent.
“Your item” is a dead giveaway. Real people talk about whatever you’re selling, not a generic “item.”
The scam in this case is probably just a fake Paypal email and/or phishing. They send you an email that looks like a Paypal confirmation, and it may even have a link to a phishing site. They’re either counting on you to follow that link or never look at your account.
Another dead giveaway (besides dubious-sounding titular positions and the use of “the item”) is the Capitalization of Random Words (as in, “Celebrating Next Week”).
Once again, if you have to ask, “Is this a scam?”, the answer is always, “Yes, yes it is.”
I don’t know about this attitude. Just a few weeks ago on these boards someone did ask if a pending deal of his was a scam, and dozens of dopers came in and blindly said, yes of course it is. But it turned out not to be.
Being a “computer person” I also get a lot of “is this a virus?” In fact, most of the time it’s not. It’s usually that the person messed up their system on their own without the help of any virus. Yet people will still give the advice to assume everything is a scam or some hacker giving you a trojan. It’s not always the case.
I think they are doing it. I have a relationship with a website that does editing, and I’m on there as someone who will edit stuff that’s in English but from a non-native writer–usually it’s something technical. But lately the guy has sent me things that read like Nigerian scams, and they want it to sound like it was written by a native English speaker, and he says he’s getting a lot of them. I refused to do them–partly because they are little snippets that I would only get $5 for doing, and partly because I have a bad feeling about it.
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