Tuesday, April 24, 2012

When Selling Privately, Beware of the Scam Artist


A scam artist emailed us to purchase the truck we have up for sale so he could ship it to Asia. Oldest trick in the book - they even offered more than we were asking for the truck $6500 purchase price - but of course - we would never be able to meet them because they are "very busy".

"Thanks for your mail...Due to nature of my job i will not be able to come for inspection,am a very busy type as i work long hours everyday,i have gone through your advertisement and i am satisfied with it.

Your price is Okay and i can offer you little bit more is $6800 i hope my offer is acceptable..?
As for the payment..i will be paying you via the fastest and secure way to pay online(PayPal).

I have a private courier agent that will come for the pick up after the payment have been made ..

You can now send me your PayPal email so i can pay in right away and also include your address in your reply.If you don't have a paypal account, you can easily set up one...log on to www.paypal.com. and sign up. its very easy.I await your reply asap."

Yeah, sure, I will jump right on that - not. Even though they indicated they wanted to use pay pal I am sure there is some way they intended to rip us off. DELETE DELETE DELETE! I would rather sell the vehicle to a live body, thanks.

Another common Kijiji or Craigslist scam is on rental properties where they try to rent a location from out of country and send you a money order for way more than you require. You cash the money order and mail them back the difference. About a month later you realize it is a scam and your bank advises you the bank order is a forgery - by this time you have sent them the money already.

Be wise-if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.



6 comments:

  1. We tried to buy a very used car. We are talking 140,ooo miles and 12 years old and after our mechanic looked at it and told the guy basically it was a good car he refused to take our call of an offer and then raised the price $800. Guess that was his right. Cost us $50 for our mechanic. It is so hard to protect yourself these days and to find honest people to deal with.

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  2. That sucks. We have had good luck buying used vehicles. Always get a mechanic to look at it though. I can't believe they tried raising the price!

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  3. We always get our cars from the auctions and it's worked great for us but just a few weeks ago we bought a total no go (engine would cost us half the cars value to sort out). Win some you lose some I guess and that's the risk of the auction but next time we're getting one privately.Rx

    http://sandersonsmithstory.blogspot.co.uk/

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  4. it always amazes me how they come up with these scams. They need to get real jobs to keep them busy!!

    Gill

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  5. As you say: If it's too good to be true it usually is...

    Sft x

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  6. We had the exact same experience/email with a vehicle we were selling - Watch out for the grammar - it's a dead giveaway that it's a scam. And always always always.........if it sounds too good to be true, it's probably a scam!! Glad you didn't get taken!

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