Friday, August 21, 2009

Weird Craiglist scam

Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game
-- Sympathy for the Devil (Rolling Stones)
Dear Internet,

I am attempting to sell a desk on craigslist and received an unusual response, quoted here in its entirety:
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 07:53:48 -0500
Subject: Re: L-shaped desk, almost new - $150 (East Side)
From: trendy carley <trendycarley0@gmail.com>

Hello ,
I appreciate your response to my inquiry. I'm interested in buying it
from you. I would've come and inspect it myself but I am on a business
trip overseas and wont be back for a while.
Please do withdraw ,with immediate effect the advert from Web as I dont
mind adding $50 for you to do that so I can be rest assured that it is
held for me. I should believe it is in good condition as stated. I will
be making the payment via a Certified Check which my secretary will
mail across to you. I'll be picking it from you with the aid of my
mover. My Mover will be coming to pick it from you once the Certified
Check has been cashed.
If condition of sales works for you I then ask that you get back to me
with the following details so that payment can be posted ASAP:
Required Information

1.Name to be issued to...
2.Contact Address(City,State,Zip code,Country):
3.Contact telephone number:(home,cell or work)
4.Clear pictures showing details

Do get back to me as soon as possible with this details for payment to
be made out to you immediately you get it on time. Also I will want you
to remove the advert as soon as possible and I dont mind paying $50 for
you to have that done ASAP as I said earlier, so no one else is lined up
for it. Thanks Hoping to hear from you soon.

Best Regards
Just what is the nature of this guy's game (not to mention his (her?) rather unlikely name)? Completely bizarre that one would pay someone to remove an ad and weirder still that one would expect them to do it before receipt of payment. Additionally, the desk is only being sold for $150 so $50 is a considerable markup (plus he'll certainly be paying a bundle for the mover). Then there's the spot where he seemingly leaves out my name from the template ("Hello, ") and the redundancy of asking for a ZIP code and country (at least, I've always heard other countries refer to them as postal codes).

I'm really curious where he's going with this. Some ideas: (please post ideas in the comments)
  1. He's just gathering names, addresses, and/or telephone numbers.
  2. No check will ever come but maybe a mover might.
  3. Check will come and bounce. Mover will come and bounce with the desk.
  4. There's some second part of this scheme that is too tough to predict at this point.
One other tidbit is that the original email from him (which came from trendycarley02@gmail.com instead and asked me rather simply "Is it in good condition..?i am interested.") was immediately tossed into the spam folder by Gmail.

I've been thinking about comedic responses. So far, the best one I've come up with is posting his response on the Internet.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

please report all scams at http://www.allscamsforum.com, find reported scams, and tell your friends about this site.

Anonymous said...

i got the same email this morning!!

David McClosky said...

I'm assuming allscamsforum isn't a scam itself, though I'm not sure why the commenter named themselves "Admin".

Meanwhile, some people I've discussed this with have suggested that the scam here is that after the check is sent, they will say they sent too much and ask for me to send some amount back thus learning some bank account details.

Anonymous said...

Check out this re: the likely scam...
http://www.smartmoney.com/spending/rip-offs/a-craigslist-scam-you-might-fall-for-0/