Internet Scam: Fake Craigslist Sellers

Craigslist is crawling with scammers because so many people use Craigslist so it is a ready-made pool of potential victims for scammers. They have to work a little harder than just sending out millions of blind emails and then working with just those gullible victims who reply to them.  On Craigslist, they actually have to manually reply to ads pretending to be a buyer. Or, like below, they post free ads for something for sale (which doesn't actually exist as an item for sale) and then move those people who reply to the ad on to the next step of the scam.

Notice how the below scammer tried to use "phishing" by creating a fake invoice that looked like Amazon, hoping his victims would think - well, Amazon is safe. But it wasn't Amazon.

This is a great example of how scammers operate on Craigslist, when they themselves are posting ads for non-existent items.

This week I saw an ad on Craigslist for a tractor and the price was great. I sent a message and got a response from the seller. He wanted to handle the transaction through Amazon so that I could be ensured of getting what he said and that he would get his money; Amazon would act as the money-middleman. Since he was listed locally I said I would pick up the stuff and pay cash. He came back and said he "had just moved to Montana and had the stuff with him". Started being suspicious. I gave him my name, address, and phone number so he could set up the sale with Amazon. I got an email on Sunday from "invoice@amazons-support.com", another red flag. I went to Amazon's website to see how they handled this type of transaction, I couldn't find anything. So I found a link to ask questions on Amazon.com, one of the topics was fraud. I sent them a copy of the email on Sunday and got a response that they do not do transactions like this and they do not sell vehicles, which a tractor qualifies as being. I sent the guy an email that said, "Either someone is taking you for a ride, or you are trying to take me for a ride, but I will not deal with amazons-support.com since Amazon.com says it is a fraudulent site."  I never heard back from the guy.  Bottom line is, "If it seems too good to be true on the internet, most likely it is a scam."

Of course, the scammer doesn't care that this guy figured out his scam. He will quickly move on to the next potential victim. It's a numbers game to them. They will keep working the scam and really spend their time only on those people who are likely to fall all the way through the scam.