Whenever I post an ad on craiglist for a product, half of the emails I get are from Nigerian scammers wanting me to ship the product to Nigeria. At first I agree so that I can get their address and contact info and once I have it, I tell them I changed my mind because I am afraid to catch ebola virus if I ship the product to Nigeria. Is there any place where you can report these scumbags? Or no one really cares.
I'll tell you who to report these scams to if you send me $4,000 for the application fee. On a more serious note, not a damn thing. You can do some vigilantism, like sending them a virus.
I feel sorry for that one Nigerian guy just trying to honestly buy something online. He's probably going WTF is going on?
the replies I get at the times on my CL listings are the out of towners that would give u extra money to ship it their way and trying to say what your selling is a rarity, here's one example I got from my Droid X posting last weekend and I replied "Kiss my ass scammer" and haven't got a reply back. I got a similar email when I sold something else a few months back, that person had the balls to reply back to me persuading that he wasn't scamming me. Kinda of a funny conversation actually, was worth my amusement.
http://dontevenreply.com/view.php?post=62 A little bit off topic, but this guy screws with craigslist posters, and it's hilarious.
How would that scam work? You invoice him on PayPal, he transfers $ into your PayPal account, you withdraw the money... is there something I'm missing here?
Someone in law enforcement told me about one of these cases where the victim was selling furniture. The scammers sent the victims the money for the furniture plus $500 shipping on Paypal, but insisted on using some shipping company that the victim had never heard of. Before the victim could get the money out of Paypal, they suckered her into wiring $400 cash to the "shipping company". The company is part of the scam. The scammer took the victim's cash, and before the victim could figure it out, the money from Paypal disappeared.
Actually, one of my semi-regular customers at the store works for Interpol to track those guys down. Dude's got some GREAT stories.
From your conversations with Mr. Interpol, are these "Nigerian" scammers really from Nigeria? Or are they just some old POS poser who lives somewhere stateside like Idaho? I can't imagine there are like a small group of Nigerians scamming/spamming millions of people on the daily.
Hmmm... that I never thought about before... I wonder if there is a nigeria.craigslist.org where everyone scams each other... "Hey, man. That was great scam. My mouth was open! Good one."
Well, they can forge cashiers checks and money orders too, if they're really motivated. The truly paranoid insist on cash
Why? I've heard about scammers saying there is a "new" paypal function that sets things up basically in a temporary holding account until both parties release the funds. This is BS. Paypal doesn't offer this, as far as I know. But in terms of sending a normal paypal payment, what is insecure about doing so? Of course, all common sense practices need to be applied such as sending payment sight-unseen. But is there some sort of fundamental security problem with paypal itself that allows somebody to hack your account or something?
This. I know people hate their fees etc. But I have not had any issues with paypal before, infact it saved me some $$$ twice.
But this scam would work in any payment method. The key is getting someone to wire cash to you, not the use of PayPal. PayPal wasn't the scam here.
People that try to scam others online ruin it for guys like me. There are certain items I wanna buy that I can only find on out of state craigslist listings. Once I say I'm in Texas but will pay for shipping, majority of the time the seller quits replying to me. It really pisses me off to the extreme.
