Thursday, March 5, 2009

Watch out for the scammers on Craigslist

Within 45 minutes of posting an ad for our Isuzu Trooper on Craigslist we had a scammer (I'm sure) offering us $200 more than our asking price and wanting to get our PayPal account information. I did a search and got some warnings about how scammers use PayPal information and some kind of software to find your password and get into your account. Craigslist has lots of warnings about selling locally and hopefully we'll get a local offer. I have the car on the Northern Virginia site, but may switch it to Harrisonburg if we don't get a bite in a few days. The clues to scammers are bad English (that one applied), an out of country purchase where they want you to ship it to them (he claimed to be a sailor but said he'd pick it up), and taking the item sight unseen (bingo!). We sold another car on Craigslist without any trouble and without any scammer contacts. We'll see what happens this time.

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