I have been contacted by a scammer on craigs list about one of my items for sale there. For those interested I’ll outline here what I did to handle these.
First, what happens is somebody will respond to your ad via email with the following:
Is this item still available for pick up?
No other information is exchanged.
What the scammer is doing is trying to get your e-mail address. If the item is still available it is natural to reply to the e-mail with an affirmative. They now have your e-mail address.
What comes next is a message something like this:
From: Teresa Garcia [email protected]
Thank you for your quick response, i am Teresa Garcia, from Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, Colorado. I would have wish to come over and inspect this at your place but I am presently off-shore. I am interested in buying this for my son in FL as a surprise gift and please just make sure it is in great condition as described. I will appreciate more pictures if available and will be sending your money asap. My shipper will be available to pick this up as soon as payment is made. Do you have PayPal account? because, I have a PayPal account that I can easily send money through because, its good for business payments. Kindly get back to me with your PayPal email address and name in order for me to transfer your money asap. Confirm sale to me by deleting the advert from Craigslist.
Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station
Colorado, Denver.
Regards
Unless you prefer to do else wise, you should be putting in your Craigslist ad that you would like a Cash and Carry deal and no shipping is available. Also you should be asking responders to be replying via phone call so you can take this out of the virtual world and putting it into the real world ASAP. These people will wear you out with e-mail chatter for sure! It’s best to get them on the phone.
I suspected I was dealing with a scammer when I got the first e-mail but really didn’t know for sure. This might have been somebody that truly couldn’t comprehend what I wrote. After I got the second e-mail I knew right there I was dealing with a scammer.
Here are the steps I did to deal with the individual:
Did a quick Internet search of the person’s e-mail address. I did find quite a few places where there were people complaining about this person. You might consider doing a search on the first sentence of the e-mail as well. This usually reveals some results likewise.
I replied to the e-mail with the following:
Please do not contact me anymore with your scams. Any future contact will result in my giving your e-mail to the proper authorities. Namely, local police, the GBI, the FBI, and your e-mail ISP. Misrepresenting yourself to scam and steal from the less knowledgeable is a serious offense.
Others have reported you on several web sites as a scammer. In the future I will not let you off that easy. Be Careful who you contact in the future with a scam. You might be being setup for a sting!
BTW, I will be contacting Gmail and Craigslist about your activities.
I then dug out the original e-mail sent via the Craigslist anonymous reply system and clicked the flag link to flag the original contact as a scam.
After doing that I went to SpamCop dot net (Setup an account if needed) and reported the second e-mail. SpamCop recognized that it was sent through the G-mail server so, all is good. Careful, you don’t want to report the first e-mail contact from Craigslist, as that will report the Craigslist server for sending Spam.
There is a space provided by SpamCop for you to input some text. I copied the same text in this space that I sent to the person doing the scam. I do this because G-mail needs to know why I am using SpamCop to report the individual.
The last step in the process is posting the e-mail address of the person that is doing the scam in this forum. This is sure to generate a few more e-mails for the scammer – LOL!
If more people would take a proactive approach to reporting these scammers we can take back Craigslist from the scammers. But it will take everybody getting involved to report them otherwise these people will continue to rip people off.
Enjoy!
Phil