Catat0nic

Okay guys...I'm fairly new to this forum so sorry if I am posting this in the wrong area. I got into a really bad deal and am trying to sell my car before I buy my 8, I put the car up on auto trader and I got an email from someone asking me the current condition of the car, my firm price and the car's location.

I give him all of that, except I don't give my address just the city its located in, then I get this email....

Dear Stuart,
Thanks for your mail.I wish to inform you that i have finilized with my client on the price of
$8,250 which we have agreed on and is ok by him,also have forwarded your last mail to him for his proper records purpose.
He said that i should inform you that the check would get to you in a US Cashiers Check of $15,250 that covers shipping \charges, pick-up,agent's fees and other chargers, to you which is a refund payment of a cancelled order earlier made by my client. Due to the Refund company's policy this check has to be made out in this amount to you ,because the company's policy only allows a refund payment on one cashier check,so you are required to deduct cost of your car which is $8,250 when payment gets to you and refund balance of $7000 to my customer via western union money transfer or money gram transfer for him to be able to offset shipping charges. After pay has reached you and balance sent back to him,our agent will come for the pick up and drive to a prepaid shipper to be shipped to my
customer,while title papers and other necessary documents would be sent by you via courier to my customer.
Please Confirm this and provide your legal name,address and phone
number for check payment to be delivered to you via courier serivce.

Thanks and God bless you.


What do you guys think? Does it look fishy to you, and is there any more information I should ask for?

Thanks for any help guys. Some of you seem really knowledgable about this kind of thing, and I appreciate any insight you can offer.

brothervoodoo

Oldest scam in the world, don't bother responding to it...

jsh1120

There is an entire cottage industry devoted to this fraud. Many, many folks selling autos get the same email. Ignore it or, better yet, report it to your ISP and to Auto Trader.

Battousai

Yeah that is a known scam akin to the 'nigerian e-mail' scams, just ignore it.

You end up sending them cash for a check that will bounce later or somehting like that.

cgrx

I bet the guy is from Canada.....seen it dozens of times. A guy on www.clubrsx.com got snagged

Catat0nic

Thats what I thought, thanks for the info guys. I would have considered going ahead with it.

I suppose my best bet is to just bite the bullet and trade it in hehe.

JM1FE

"Advance Fee Fraud", on which the 419 scam is based: http://www.snopes.com/crime/fraud/nigeria.asp

brothervoodoo

They should call it the 420 scam because you have to high to actually do it...

MrMethane

Golden rule of online selling: If someone requests you use Western Union for anything, its most likely a scam.

Western Union is untraceable and if its not in the US there is pretty much nothing anyone can do to get your money back.

GotZoom

LMAO! Excellent !

khtm

You can find the IP address the e-mail was sent from by looking at the header, and do a WHOIS on it (http://www.arin.net/whois/) to see where the person is located. Sometimes it can be narrowed down to a city. You'd at least know the ISP and could pass that on to (the police?)...I dunno. Whoever handles this type of criminal behaviour.

MrMethane

The problem in doing that is that most of these scams work on multiple levels. The first step in these scams is to steal someones creditcard number and buy your own domain space under their name. You report this IP to the police and they show up at some poor sap's house and bust him for fraud when he is really the victim of credit card fraud himself.

The best thing to do is just ignore it and spread the word so nobody else falls for it. Hopefully one day people will know enough not to fall for these scams. But then I guess someone would just come up with a new one. Just always think to yourself. If it sound too good to be true it probably is.

khtm

You may not realize this, but e-mail headers (usually) contain an X-sender which is the IP address of the computer the e-mail was sent from. The ISP will then know the location of the computer. That's what I was talking about. So the police would be showing up at the address that the e-mail was sent from, not some poor sap's house

Of course, if this e-mail was sent from an internet cafe or sent through a proxy, there's no point in trying to track down the person. But some people aren't that smart

MrMethane

Yeah they usually are sent from internet cafe's and if they aren't the IP addresses in the headers are usually spoofed. You really can't rely on addresses in email headers.

Then again it could be some moron high school kid who heard about the scam and is trying it from his home computer so it could work. But in general these scams come from out of country so even if you do track down the computer there probably isn't anything that can be done about it by US authorities. Thats why your basically screwed if you fall for one, there is virtually no chance you'll get your money back because its extremely hard to track and even if you do track them down they're from a different country and can't be prosecuted under US law.

Catat0nic

Judging from the time each email was sent, I would imagine its from another country. The first thing that alerted me was thinking "why would an agent or a dealer be working on something like this at that time?"

I've also seen enough of those nigerian scams to find it ironic that this mystery check which for some reason cannot be divided comes out to exactly 7000 over my asking price. Still though I have to wonder whats to stop me from getting check and cashing it. I won't do something like that, I'd rather not have any involvment in this kind of thing.

Thanks for all the replies guys.

irish8

Scam!!

- Irish

Air Force RX8

The fact that said check is most likely counterfeit and would get you "inconvenienced" by the local authorities at the least. Just ignore it or call the local postal inspector as they deal with mail fraud cases and now tends to include those that begin in electronic format, but still use the mail to carry out the fraud.