This is nothing new, but it's worth mentioning again, as a young friend of mine almost got taken yesterday.
He's been looking on Craigslist for a motorcycle to buy, and he found one that was just too good to be true for the price asked. He got all excited, wanted to see the bike and buy it on the spot, but gave me a call first, just to see what I thought about it.
I looked at the ad and it didn't smell right. There was no masked email addy at the top of the ad below the title, and no phone number to call. The only contact info was a .jpeg of an email addy. The motorcycle was one I'm very familiar with, and the used value is about $12,000-$13,000. Asking price on this one was $4600.
The bike was supposed to be in the next town over, and my young friend had already emailed for a chance to see it right away. Fortunately, he did not put his name, address or phone number in his email.
I did a little searching, and came up with this site. Sure enough, the "seller's" email addy was listed as one of the regular scammers using Craigslist to cheat people out of their hard earned money.
When the "seller" responded to my friend this morning, it was just like in the script. The bike was cheap because this "lady" got it in a divorce. She doesn't have a license to drive. It was also halfway across the country because she was starting over in a new town. She'd pay for shipping, and my friend could pay an invoice sent by a non-existent Ebay service when he approved of the bike and wanted to buy it. There'd be no risk, she said, and no obligation. Just send personal info to get the transaction rolling.
My friend was very disappointed, of course, but happy he'd didn't lose his cash.
I'm not sure where this was eventually going to go, but this scam allegedly originates in Nigeria.
BTW, the ad for the bike was gone from Craigslist shortly after I looked at it, and probably within minutes of them receiving my friend's email.
Just wanted everybody to be careful when buying things from unknown folks at far less than value.
