latest scam involves PayPal

[Donald]

Someone finds something you have for sale on CraigsList or some rag and offers to buy it and pay you via PayPal and wants it shipped. They tell you they are paying you more than the selling price so as to cover shipping and tell you who to send the shipping money to. Then you receive email from PayPal (or it looks like its from PayPal) saying the transaction is complete and you have the money. So now the buyer wants you to send money to the shipper. But a quick look at your PayPal account shows no money has been received. The fake email from PayPal does not have your real first/last name like it should. The buyer did ask for my phone number (which I did not give) and I am thinking they might use that to look for my first and last name. The domain name of the email was not PayPal, a quick clue it may not have been from PayPal.

 

[mongo161]

Curious....was this e-mail in your "Spam" or in your regular mail.

What kind of Virus, Email protection program are you currently running?

 

[Drew99GT]

Originally Posted By: Donald
Someone finds something you have for sale on CraigsList or some rag and offers to buy it and pay you via PayPal and wants it shipped. They tell you they are paying you more than the selling price so as to cover shipping and tell you who to send the shipping money to.


Huh? Aren't you the shipper?

When I sell something on Craigslist, I receive a dozen of these weird scams. I usually read about that far and stop. If it sounds bizarre, too good to be true, or just stupid, it's a scam.

 

[HTSS_TR]

Yeah, those are scams.

Whenever I listed anything on CR, I always received those scam emails.

The legitimate buyers have reasonable question(s) about the product(s), price discount, availability for pickup ...

 

[Donald]

I get scams all the time on CL items I sell. This was the first time I had one involve PayPal.

 

[mongo161]

Sounds like it is better to set up a seperate e-mail address for anything that you list on CL.

After the sale is over....delete the screen name....no more scam e-mails after the address used for CL is deleted.

What do you think?

 

[dwcopple]

screen name? on Craigslist? why don't you anonymize it?

 

[Pablo]

Yeah, pretty stupid scam. But the ignorant live among us. Most I have seen aren't even sophisticated looking fake paypal emails. Hit delete.

 

[matrass]

sorry to hear about the scam. I have sold a few things on CL and to be honest do not understand the people on there. they want everything for nothing or they say I will take it and you never hear from them again. I never give out my address or phone number to these people, just set up a place to meet that we agree upon. they have my email addy only so I can always block them.