I’m in the market for some used seventh generation console games and there have been a handful of ads that seem too good to be true (tons of games plus the console for less than $100), and one has some grammar errors that make me think they may be foreign. When I email the seller I won’t get a reply, but I will see the ad posted again.
So what is the motivation? These are local ads for local sellers. Do they just collect email addresses to sell them or something?
If they don’t respond, I don’t think they get your email address, since craigslist sends all emails through an auto-generated forwarding account.
I also don’t think grammar errors necessarily indicate foreignness. I’ve gotten all manner of pseudo-English from people on craigslist, many of whom have actually shown up at my door. I think many people are just fairly bad at written communication.
Can you post a link to some examples?
I notice them in the Photo/Video section of Atlanta CL, though I haven’t seen any in the past couple of weeks (maybe because I’ve been flagging them?)
The usual scenario: recent model professional-grade camera or lens for about half what you’d expect for a similar used item; the map location is always the same (which I’m guessing is the default location if you just specify “Atlanta”); the reply-to is email only, and is in a weird format such as “j l. grey man@ g mail” (literally, like that), and this is not in the text, but the popup box you’ll get if you hit the CL Reply button.
I don’t get it either. I mean, the email address is never properly-formed, so a Reply via CL would get you nowhere, and there is no other contact info.
Obviously these guys are using Atlanta CL to send coded messages to each other.
A weirdly formatted email address like that in the reply field does support the idea that they’re harvesting email addresses. They’re hoping for someone to read it and type it in, fixing the errors, and then they get your actual address rather than going through the CL email routing.
Of the ads I saw, I replied to both. However I didn’t use the craigslist email, I used the email in the ad.
One never replied, the other replied and said ‘the item is sold, but I got it for free on gambling site XYZ, you should check it out’.
So I figured out what that one was for, never figured out what the other one was for.
