The wife is selling her laptop and posted a listing on Craigslist. (I hate Craigslist, but whatever…) So she got an E-Mail from an interested party, to which my wife responded. The interested woman got back, and this is what she said:
That’s three strikes right there: 1) Drop shipping to a third party (with bonus unnecessary and exciting-sounding job description), 2) …in west Africa ($100 says it’s Nigeria), and 3) $290 in shipping fees – which is approximately 1/3rd of the actual cost.
Now, aside from the fact that the shipping fees offered don’t even come close to what’s needed to ship this package, I’m trying to figure out the angle here. All of the other 419 scams use the usual wire transfer bank fraud scheme. This is PayPal though. It’s a tad more secure than regular payment methods, though I don’t completely know how far your ass is covered in a case like this.
So how does this scam work? Does the request for funds play into it somehow? (It must, that request sticks out like a sore thumb, it’s totally unnecessary with normal transactions.) Do they pay with a stolen credit card? How would I end up on the hook here? Where’s the escalation of funds that comes standard with 419 scams? I’m just not seeing the big picture here.
Firstly, if you hover over the link, does it even point to Paypal.com?
It’s probably either the setup for an advance fee scam - i.e. you’ll have to send him some fees before he sends the money (which part never happens)
Or an overpayment scam - oops, I accidentally sent you $3,240 instead of $1,240 - but for some plausible reason, I want you to send the $2,000 back to me as a separate, new transaction. Your payment for $2,000 clears, his payment for $3,240 bounces.
My friend was recently involved in security breach in Paypal. Someone went in and filed false charge backs on a bunch of people’s accounts. Hers was for some art done for a friend. So after confirming with said friend that they never did a charge back she called Paypal who basically told her tough shit. And since she didn’t have the money to pay for the original charge plus the charge back fees, they threatened to send her to collections. Well after much screaming and a three-way call with the owner of the account that supposedly did the charge back, the Paypal employee discovered that many people had had the same thing happen and gee, don’t worry we’ll repair it.
My friend had an experience with something similar when selling her Playstation on eBay.
In her case, once the scammer confirmed she’d accept PayPal, they told her that they wanted the console sent to their son, who was studying at a bible college in Nigeria (always the colourful excuses, huh?). They then followed up with a bogus email from “PayPal Customer Service” to advise her that the funds were being held in reserve, and they’d be release to her PayPal account as soon as she’d provided proof of shipping like a UPS waybill #.
What the scammer is hoping for, of course, is that the seller won’t be familiar enough with PayPal to know they don’t ever do that… and that by the time they figure out that there’s no money being held in reserve, the package will already be in their hot little hands.
Ah… okay, the overpayment and “held in reserve” schemes sound like the most plausible here. It makes sense though that “she” would request that I send a money request though; that gives the scammer the excuse to send the fake “held in reserve” E-Mail, because having the scammer pay directly would automatically generate a payment confirmation from PayPal.
It still seems like more trouble than it’s worth for a laptop that isn’t even worth what it would cost in shipping though; there’s no potential payoff of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars here like the millionaire prince scams. Are times getting so touch for Nigerian princes that they’ve been reduced to nickel and diming people?
