I have a dresser with a large mirror for sale, it is posted on a number of sites online. My daughter’s boyfriend (oh, let’s call him Irish) has also listed it, hoping to help me get it sold. I am asking 400.00.
Irish received a response earlier this month which I immediately shot down, stating cash only. He just received another response from the same person, and while accepting that it is a scam, he isn’t understanding how the scam works, and I am failing in my explanations. I would appreciate all comments on just how this scam works.
Here is the offer from said alleged scammer:
“Okay I will be buying from you and I will like to send you a check for the payment and please i don’t mind Adding $70 for you to hold it for me. I’ll take care of the Shipping cus I have my shipper that will pick it up and the item won’t be moved until you have your pay in hand. Sound good?”
That transcript includes all of the grammar and punctuation mistakes from the wannabe buyer.
I appreciate your time and look forward to helping to educate Irish and my daughter.
You can deposit the cheque to your account and it appears to have cleared, but sometimes it takes a while before the other bank notifies your bank that the cheque bounced. You’re then out the amount of the cheque, plus likely have an NSF charge added to it by your bank.
It sounds like the buyer is just planning to give you a fake or bounced check and walk away with the item, knowing that there’s no paper trail with Real Shipping Company That Totally Exists, Inc. (It also sounds similar to the usual scam of writing you a check for the item plus some extra amount and asking for the extra amount back in cash. The check doesn’t go through, but the scammer walks away with the cash.) Exchanging money for goods and services is great, but checks aren’t money; they’re requests for a bank to give money to a third party that can be delayed, forged, or ignored by the bank. Until he has the actual money, Irish shouldn’t give away his goods and services to some random person on the Interwebs.
Also, if you call your own bank and ask if the check has cleared, they are likely to say, “Yes”. In fact with foreign checks drawn from remote countries it can take 10 days for the check to really clear. There is some confusion among bank telephone reps regarding the difference between “Funds available” and “Your bank actually has received funds from other bank”.
So the perp sends you a fake check for $470 and you send him back $70 in real funds. You’ve also IDd yourself as a mark so you can expect further contact.
Thank you, that is what I was saying, but he gets it now. Also, while I had him reading your posts over my shoulder he received another response, from someone else, saying the exact same thing with the exception of the extra $70.00 being dropped to $50.00. :mad: The young man has learned a valuable lesson, thanks for having my back!
All you need to know is that anytime anyone offers to send you a check worth more than your asking price IT IS 100% SCAM. In fact it’s such a well-known and common scam that I’m surprised these jerks haven’t come up with something different.
While the scammer said he/she was sending you an extra $70, don’t be surprised that they make a “mistake” and send you an extra $700. Oops, just wire the extra $630 to my cousin in Nigeria. That’s the real scam, and they never make an attempt to pick up the item.
Even without the extra money, never accept a check from ANYONE on Craigslist. As a much younger man I learned that the hard way when I sold a beater car for $300 and the check bounced a week later and I got dinged for the 300 and overdraft fees.
This was sound advice 40 years before Craigslist was invented.
Back in the 80s I used to buy & sell used cars. I accepted checks from buyers only one way: we drive to the buyer’s bank, the one the check is drawn on. The buyer converts the check to greenbacks while I hang out in the bank’s lobby. There in the lobby I get the greenbacks and the buyer gets the signed title & keys.
It’s amazing how many offers for a check-based deal fell apart under those ground rules. I guess some folks are just intimidated by tellers or something. :dubious:
Its possible the trick is to try to get the vendor hand over the goods on a dud cheque.
But another function in the “will you take a cheque” is to test for gullibility. Cause who is saying “sure I will take the cheque” except the gullible/naive ?
Then they start asking for real favours… "hey, can you pay for this craiglist item near you ? … Its a set of speakers for $1000, they are worth $5000 new. and so I will pay you $2000 , when you just pay the $1000 " … So the speaker seller is in on it, and its a $50 (… close to $0 ) pair of speakers, that you pay $1000 for…
But the guts of it is, paying out up front for something of lesser value, or paying out and then never getting that value. (or with cheques, the value can be apparently there, then disappear later on… )
I think the banks are really the ones at fault here. If I deposit a check, and ask if it cleared, and the bank says “yes”, then I should be able to take that to mean that the check has cleared. If the bank tells me that the check has cleared, and I go ahead and spend that money, and the bank then turns around a week later and says “Nuh-uh, it didn’t clear after all”, then I’m now being scammed by the bank, too.
You can’t write out a certified check on the fly like you can with a regular check, you have to go to the bank and have them make it out. Usually buying a used car from an individual involves some in-person negotiation, if you walk in planning to pay what the person orginally asked you’re leaving money on the table. If you’re going to go to the bank after you’ve already negotiated a final price, you may as well just withdraw cash to avoid the fees for certified checks/money orders, any risk of shenanigans with the check, and more. Car dealerships are set up to verify checks and know what is safe to accept and what’s not (and will take a regular check without any real hassle), but individuals usually don’t and don’t want to take any chances.
Also, for a scam like the OP encountered you’ll get a cashier’s check from some bank in a third world country that looks legitimate but after a few weeks doesn’t come through.
40 years ago there were reliable bank checks AKA “certified checks”. Now many of them are forgeries too. A private party would be an idiot to accept one, and a commercial party would be an idiot to accept one from a non-local bank. And even then only after calling the issuing bank to verify the check number, payee, and amount match their records.
The only even marginally reliable means of value transfer in the USA today is cash or electronic transfer. Anything else leaves the door open to the check turning out to be bad and the honest person is left holding the bag.
Sadly, that’s not supported by the relevant regulations.
For competitive reasons the banks have been pushed to declare the funds “available” before the check actually clears.
Beyond that, as part of the streamlining of archaic paper-based check clearance procedures in the US a few years ago there’s conditional clearing as well as final clearing. Because several banks can be involved in the chain, there are several successive periods, each a couple days long, where something might go wrong.
Most folks, including many bank customer service folks, don’t fully understand the distinction between funds available, cleared, and finally cleared. So even if you know to ask the right question you may not get the right answer.
You can imagine the hue and cry that would arise if folks who got paid on the 15th couldn’t spend any of that money until the 25th or so. Given current industry infrastructure that’s what it would take to preclude bad checks from ever flowing back to harm the original depositor.
Absent real-time all-banks-to-all-other-banks connectivity with instant irrevocable funds transfer we’re left where we are: Everybody involved assumes the check will clear until it doesn’t. And the depositor is legally & practically the one on the hook for any failure in the chain.
I don’t think checks themselves were any more reliable 40 years ago, it’s just that pre-internet getting a check from a foreign bank was hard enough that most people wouldn’t encounter one, and rare enough that they’d be handled specially over a long stretch of time when the bank got one. Plus banking laws about making funds available have changed, in the old days the bank would have taken as long or longer to fully clear the check, but wouldn’t let you access the money until them.
Do you have any cite that non-local cashiers checks or certified checks were more reliable in the 1970s than now? I don’t have any hard information, but I really doubt that the old system handled foreign checks more reliably than now, and that it would only be safer because a bank was more likely to say ‘I’m not touching that’ or ‘you can’t have these funds for another two months while we clear this’.
I wasn’t discussing foreign as in other-country checks. I can’t speak to them either now or then.
A key difference between today and 40 years ago (1975 for reference) is that the printing skills & tech necessary to produce a plausible forgery used to be pretty hard to find. Nowadays anybody with something like Adobe Illustrator and a color inkjet can set themselves up as a decent forger.
As well the proliferation of legit cashiers checks printed via laser printer at a real bank have served to mask the fake ones. Used to be you needed some specialist gear to imprint the amounts, etc. Now, not so much.
None of that specialist gear was impossible to buy. And the printer’s apprentice skills weren’t impossible to find. But nowadays it’s almost point-click simple. Which swelled the ranks of potential US-based forgers from (all experienced graphics artists who are also skilled printers in the US) to (all computer owners in the US). With predictable results on the volume of forgeries.
No cite, but my wife’s been in banking oversight for 30 years now. The explosion in forged cashiers checks pretty well coincides with the explosion in availability of color copiers and color home inkjet printers.
I agree this is a scam, but I’m wondering why it takes so long for a bank to verify funds in the year 2015. I can go to Wal-Mart, write a check, and the check reader will scan the check, electronically contact the bank, verify available funds, and automatically debit my account.
Why are banks unable to do this seemingly simple thing?
Oh, I know that. I’m saying that there oughtta be a law, not that there already is.
And I recognize that clearing a check requires communication between multiple banks, possibly even a string of many banks, and that that takes time.
But I can’t see any conceivable reason why, in this day and age, that needed time should ever be longer than three minutes, and that’s assuming that everything that could conceivably slow things down happens at once. Ordinarily, it should take less than a second.