Why so many scams discussion

[floyd]

Originally Posted by Glenn Baglo

Canada has a "no call list". The scammers are out of country so they use that list as a resource.

[Vtec]

When buying I have to talk to a real person. When selling on Craigslist I put the following at the end of each post I make:

"Please reply by email with your name and a personal contact number. Sorry, without these your reply will be discarded. Scammers please save your time and mine."

If they can't give a name or phone number they are not real. And if they really want it in the first place they will try again. Don't bother to think even for a second they are a potential sale if they can't do that. And I won't answer any questions either as you will get some who try to get you to reply with a question and no phone number. These replies are also a waste of your time. Name and number!

[Glenn Baglo]

Anybody can make up a name and use a 'burner' phone. Not sure what this proves.

[Borrego Dave]

Originally Posted by Vtec

"Please reply by email with your name and a personal contact number. Sorry, without these your reply will be discarded. Scammers please save your time and mine."

Scams are pretty easy to see right off, the common sense kicks in, a 30k RV for $2000, they get flagged . I've always had good luck with C/L, both buying and selling but do any communications through C/L to start with as I don't text. Like you, Vtec, when selling I ask interested parties to leave a phone # and I'll get back to them. So far, after 10 years there has been no problems, even with a few big ticket items.

[Vtec]

Originally Posted by Glenn Baglo

Anybody can make up a name and use a 'burner' phone. Not sure what this proves.

Typically when selling items you get a slew of emails that I used to waste time answering. This weeds out anyone who isn't a person and if they want the item I am selling, sure, come look at it when I call them. No transaction other than in person. Go ahead and use a "brurner phone" but they do have to show up. Scammers never show up in person and have become few and far in between since I have been doing it. No checks in the mail, no Paypal, everything in person. Not only that, you can use google, Facebook, or even the state court system to check the buyer out. I don't put my number in the ad and get calls at all hours, I get theirs and call when it is convenient.

After buying and selling at least 20 large items like cars and campers for myself and family members that little disclaimer of a call back number and name has saved me a lot of time. And buying, our Casita was 500 miles and last two vehicles with distances of 175 miles and 2100 miles out. All Craigslist and no problems at all.

[FlyGuy]

A fast way to identify a scammer is to tell them that you'll pay cash in full upon a face to face transfer. Said transfer can occur at a Police / Sheriff Department closest to them for the "safety of all parties". You also have a "friend / relative" (whether you do or don't) who lives "an hour or so away" and, they're available to inspect the trailer before you make the long drive with the cash. Scammers will disappear when presented with these terms. Of course, they also need to have a CLEAR ORIGINAL TITLE (NO photocopy) in THEIR NAME before the sale is completed. If the title is in someone else's name, you MUST deal DIRECTLY with the person named on the title (or the attorney authorized to handle estate transfers). ANY other way is going to be BOGUS. Ebay has scammers and, when I try to alert eBay, they really DON'T want to know (shame on eBay)! I've also seen scams offered on RacingJunk.com (when notified RacingJunk pulled the ad) and, have contacted dealers when I see a picture I suspect is fraudulent (their stock is photographed and used by scammers). As already mentioned, "there's a sucker born every minute". Conduct your business in a prudent and honest manner, using due diligence and, scamming you will be VERY difficult. If a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is. Remember, even if you do GET an item you're interested in, if it turns out that said item IS stolen, at the very least, you'll lose said item and good luck trying to find the crook who sold it to you.

[Doctor Harold]

Lots of good advice here. I would add something not many people know:

People know that they can stop payment on a check they write, but not many people know that a stop payment can be done on a cashier's check. If someone wants to give me a cashier's check it has to be on a bank I know, and has a local branch, and I will cash the check before the merchandise is exchanged.

Scammers often want you to wire money by Western Union. Western Union operates all over the world, and there is absolutely no recourse if you don't get what you paid for. Well, that works both ways, doesn't it. If you are selling something and the person wants to send you a cashier's check from a bank you don't recognize and doesn't have a local branch, have them send funds by Western Union. A scammer would have to give cash to Western Union, and that will never happen. Another option would be a US Postal Service Money Order.

Also, very convincing fake money orders can be made because of the cheaply available technology, but a USPO money order can be taken to the Post Office, and if it's fake you will know before shipping your item.

My sister's in-laws were scammed out of more than a million dollars, their entire life savings, and then their house. It actually takes a very intelligent person to be scammed out of that much money. He was a brilliant doctor, and had been the CEO of a hospital. The problem was that he knew he was smart and believed he was too smart to be scammed. Several interventions failed. The state elder abuse people said he seemed to have all his faculties and had the right to spend his money as he pleased. all the interventions did was make him and his wife secretive.

Scammers play on arrogance as well as gullibility, and on greed. Sure there are amazing deals out there, and you might even be the person who sees the ad for a like-new Porche for a few hundred dollars because the wife is angry at her cheating husband, but if you do your due diligence you can drive that Porche home instead of lining the pockets of a scammer with your hard-earned money.

Still, in general, if it sounds to good to be true, it almost always is.

Harold

[thrifty bill]

Originally Posted by Glenn Baglo

Anybody can make up a name and use a 'burner' phone. Not sure what this proves.

Actually when you are a seller it can work better than you might think. Scammer responses are automated so they don’t answer simple questions. I’ve asked “scammers are killing C/L right now. Please put your name and zip code in any reply so I know you are real. Sadly replies without these answers will be deleted as a precaution. Thanks for your understanding.”

[mizterwizard]

There have always been people who want to steal a living rather than earn one. Today it is easier for them to get to you than ever so it seems that there are more of them. When one thief can reach millions of people almost for free, it is more likely that you will encounter several.

I saw somewhere recently that sometime next year the number of fake phone calls will exceed the number of real ones. From there on out it will be more likely that the person or computer on the other end is a scammer than someone you will actually want to talk to.

In this world of high technology there has to be a solution to this problem. The thing is, the thieves work from places that don't care.

If every inheritance and lottery win I have ever received was legitimate I'd be among the richest people in the world. No car company, bank or internet giant has a lottery that I know of but I win them every day.

I've gotten hooked on several things. It has never cost me any money but it has wasted my time, which is the same thing.

The times they are a changin, and not always for the better.

[Bruce H]

It is a new world (well less than 20 years old) in that the technology genie is out of the bottle. In a few minutes a scammer can use technology and the internet to present a scam to literally millions of people.

A cashier's check means nothing. A photo quality printer will produce a better quality cashier's check than the banks do. Informing someone you don't know that you will be showing up at some location with cash to purchase an expensive item is a good way to get hurt as well as robbed.

Craigslist is populated by people from both edges of the bell curve (a polite way of saying it has a high sleeze factor) and has virtually no built in safeguards. If examples of craigslist's sleeze factor were posted here the moderators would quickly shut the thread down.

Most people consider credit card fees or paypal fees to be money thrown away. They are not. They are a bargain. If you are a seller you are assured of getting your money. If you are a buyer you are assured of getting your item(s) or a refund. Think about what that is worth.

Also Ebay has several built in safeguards that craigslist and others do not. They guarantee purchases. They promptly investigate fraud. There is the transaction history of both buyer and seller that is readily available to users. Avoid buying an RV on Ebay from a seller with a new account or zero feed back. Also if you know something like an RV is worth in the area of $8,000 to $10,000, for example, and you see it for sale at "buy it now" for $2,500, that IS a scam.

Don't mess with it, even with the safeguards. A photo of the item is no proof of anything. Any photo found on the internet can be copied and pasted to another website in ten seconds.

I am interested in antique farm tractors so I often scan Ebay and Craigslist for them. A year ago I purchased one from a seller in Wyoming who had it listed on Ebay. He was also a tractor collector and had decided to list several of the tractors in his collection on Ebay. I traveled to meet him and we became good friends. A few months later I did an internet search for "Farmall tractors craigslist" and got a hit on one in SW Kansas. There was a picture of one of my new friend's tractors for sale at a low price. I knew it was his tractor because his house in Wyoming was in the background. It was the same picture he had posted on Ebay. The craigslist seller had a San Diego, California phone number. I sent a copy of the craigslist ad to my friend. It still took a couple of days for it to disappear. Ebay would have a similar ad gone in about two minutes. I see one or two scams on the craigslist for my area every week. I really have other things to do with the hours of my life other than police craigslist.

Craigslist used to have a way to for readers to flag fraudulent ads and the ad would be immediately removed. Any user could flag any ad. What started happening was ads that were perfectly ok were being flagged and removed as sort of a "vandalism". I believe that "feature" has been removed. Again, craigslist has a high sleeze factor.

[Doctor Harold]

Originally Posted by Bruce H

..... Craigslist used to have a way to for readers to flag fraudulent ads and the ad would be immediately removed. Any user could flag any ad. What started happening was ads that were perfectly ok were being flagged and removed as sort of a "vandalism". I believe that "feature" has been removed. Again, craigslist has a high sleeze factor.

Abusers always poison the well for everyone. Craigslist still has the "prohibited" link to click on, but slow or no response may have something to do with the lack of manpower that Craigslist has to police flagged posts. Since ads post for free Craigslist is not very motivated to spend a lot of money policing ads. Another reason viewers will flag a post is that they are competitors and want to eliminate competing ads.

Buyer beware is the rule, but is also the refuge of the scoundrel, especially on sites like ebay. On ebay shady sellers offer a money back guarantee because they know ebay will enforce their rules. So a scoundrel offers something with a distorted description about the item's quality and uses a stock or inaccurate photo. The buyer returns it and gets his or her money back, and the buyer has to pay return shipping. The seller is not harmed, except for the possibility of negative feedback, but the seller can counter that with "I refunded the buyers money."

In over 20 years of buying and selling a lot on ebay I have bought merchandise twice that was misrepresented. These were very small purchases. On one the seller refunded my money and did not have me return the item. On the other one the seller wanted me to return the item at my expense, and the shipping made it not worth it. We exchanged several emails and it became obvious that the seller was a real jerk. It was the first time I ever left negative feedback.

I see a lot of ads on ebay that misrepresent their item. I have reported some that appeared intentionally fraudulent, and two weeks later the ad was still there. So, while ebay offers some protection after the sale, they are not interested in preventing fraud, most likely because fraudulent ads still generate money for ebay, and if someone doesn't complain about getting ripped off by a seller, ebay has no reason to care.

Harold

[barisad]

These people are trying in most cases to acquire email addresses. If you notice most of these ads do not contain but one photo. Some ads state, can send more photos. So you reply, either email through Craigslist or text, they respond saying provide me with your email address and I’ll send you more photos. So, you give them your email address and the spam emails start coming. Pornography, credit card applications, etc.

They sell your email address to these spammers.

[Garyscamper]

When I was looking for my Scamp 13, every single listing on Craigslist was a scam. Several used the same pictures, and many used the my son is in the military, and told me to sell it, which they said explained why the trailer was in another state, or that the pictures showed a "sample" scamp, since the one for sale was in another state etc. They all said that they would guarantee 100% satisfaction, and all I had to do was pay for shipping. I blogged about it at the time


eggscamper.blogspot.com




GQ