Has anyone in here encountered this sort of BS?
I thought I would just throw in my two cents on this topic. I've been dealing with scammers since around '02. I do alot of business on ebay/online classifieds and have probably received close to a thousand (not an exageration) of these emails.
I told her I don't play that game.
Let me offer some reasons why not to do this:
*Its a scam, plain and simple. Any attempt to turn it around into a legitimate transaction or even to just blow off some steam by sending a "go and f*** yourself" is a waste of your time.
*Replying often times gets your email address harvested and sold to spam lists. This is particularly true with craigslist since you're initially hidden behind that nice craigslist auto response. Replying not only gives them a valid email, but lets them know that it's being read.
*Sometimes these people are phishing for identity theft, not the old "send a fake money order then get the rest wired back" scheme. In fact, they often know that you realize or understand the concept of this scam. It's a red herring designed just to get enough info out of you that they can obtain the rest.
*Scammers often have access to simple, yet devasting tools that can bring your network down, bring your website down, flood your inbox, and just generally make your life a living hell if you make them angry enough. Hence my suggestion not to bother with sending a "go and f*** yourself" reply.
A good example and small anecdote to that last tip was something that I've been doing for the past few months. The rate of obvious scams and spammers on my local craigslist was increasing almost ten fold with the addition of newer bots that can defeat the supposed "no automated listings" protection impossed by craigslist. The flagging tool works well, but sometimes this stuff just doesn't get pulled fast enough or sometimes even at all. I whipped together a little program that ultimately, with 2 clicks of my mouse, can remove any posting on any region of craigslist within seconds. All it took was about an hour of trial and error trying to understand how craigslist works "internally", and after that it was a matter of minutes before I had written a program to exploit it (I'm positive other people out there have written almost identical programs before me). The point of this is that after I was done, it hit me just how scary it is that it's so easy to screw anyone over on craigslist, and to just plain f*** with people in general electronically this day and age. Thankfully, I'm not the type of person who would ever try to do something bad. But there are plenty of people out there who will.
Alot of people have good advice for avoiding scams, but the most easy and simplistic rule for understanding who not to deal with is this:
If the buyer is proposing a payment method thats any more complicated than "let me give you cash", "let me write you a check (assuming you will take a check)", or "will you trade for X (assuming you will accept trades)", then there is absolutely no reason to deal with this person. In this case of the example greg posted above, that would be this exact verbiage: "
As soon as you receive the payment and it clears in your bank you will be deducting". This is completely extraneous. A legitimate transaction involves exhanging cash and or goods for other goods, there's no reason to ever "deduct" anything. Theres no real reason to continue reading that email after you get to that line. If you follow this rule, and take into consideration the things I've mentioned, you shouldn't ever have any issues to deal with.
