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.
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.
ReplyDeleteThat 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!
ReplyDeleteWe 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
ReplyDeletehttp://sandersonsmithstory.blogspot.co.uk/
it always amazes me how they come up with these scams. They need to get real jobs to keep them busy!!
ReplyDeleteGill
As you say: If it's too good to be true it usually is...
ReplyDeleteSft x
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!
ReplyDelete