Yet Another Scam

Hi,

Just thought I'd share an experience I've had with selling a car on carsales.com.au. I had an email offer to purchase my car at full value, plus paypal fees for someone who didn't have time to shop for a car. It sounded complete dodgy, but I tried to think of the possibilities of how this could be a scam. As long as I had the money accepted in paypal and cleared into my bank account before handing over the keys, I should be right, right?

Anyway, I allowed it to progress on the basis of 1) I couldn't work out how the scam would work, and 2) I hadn't committed to anything yet.

The scam was revealed pretty quickly. Turns out the guy couldn't pick up the car himself, and needed an agent to pick it up for him. He needed to pay the agent $950 via western union to an address in london, but he couldn't pay as he didn't have a credit card. Of course, he had already told me he was paying me via paypal using a credit card, so this didn't stack up.

To get around this problem, he would pay me the full amount, plus the agent fee, and I would send them the money via western union. Oh, and paypal would magically hold the money at his request until he'd received confirmation that the western union money transfer came through. Now alarm bells were ringing very loudly! I received a 'paypal' email that I'd received the full amount. The maths on the email was wrong, but no matter. The email was actually from "[email protected]", though the name was "[email protected]".

I just replied saying that unfortunately his scam was not coming to fruition, and the matter has been referred to the police (which I have done).

No harm was done as it obviously was a scam and pretty easy to spot in the end. The interesting thing about it was that instead of being a cold email from a long lost family relaitve in Nigeria, blah blah blah, it was a response to legitimate transaction that I had initiated, namely selling a car. It made it a lot easier for them to get to first base, so to speak.

When reporting it to carsales, they were well aware of the scam and simply blocked the guys email, which was just a freebie yahoo one anyway.

No doubt others have heard of this, but it was new to me so I thought I would pass it on and hope that maybe these fools will one day go away and die somewhere...

Cheers,
Dave