There is no buyer.
There is only a scammer trying to steal your money.
The next email will be from another of the scammer's fake names and free email addresses pretending to be "Paypal" saying "kindly send some fee via Western Union or moneygram and we will release the funds".
Or the next email will claim "too much money was sent" and you must send your cash to pay the "car shipper" before the paypal transaction completes.
Paypal does NOT send such emails, ever. Paypal does NOT demand the receiver pay a fee. EVER. No exceptions.
Western Union and moneygram do not verify anything on the form the sender fills out, not the name, not the street address, not the country, not even the gender of the receiver, it all means absolutely nothing. The clerk will not bother to check ID and will simply hand off your cash to whomever walks in the door with the MTCN# and question/answer. Neither company will tell the sender who picked up the cash, at what store location or even in what country your money walked out the door. Neither company has any kind of refund policy, money sent is money gone forever.
Now that you have responded to a scammer, you are on his 'potential sucker' list, he will try again to separate you from your cash. He will send you more emails from his other free email addresses using another of his fake names with all kinds of stories of being the perfect buyer, great jobs, lottery winnings, millions in the bank and desperate, lonely, sexy singles. He will sell your email address to all his scamming buddies who will also send you dozens of fake emails all with the exact same goal, you sending them your cash via Western Union or moneygram.
You could post up the email address and the emails themselves that the scammer is using, it will help make your post more googlable for other suspicious potential victims to find when looking for information.
Do you know how to check the header of a received email? If not, you could google for information. Being able to read the header to determine the geographic location an email originated from will help you weed out the most obvious scams and scammers. Then delete and block that scammer. Don't bother to tell him that you know he is a scammer, it isn't worth your effort. He has one job in life, convincing victims to send him their hard-earned cash.
Whenever suspicious or just plain curious, google everything, website addresses, names used, companies mentioned, phone numbers given, all email addresses, even sentences from the emails as you might be unpleasantly surprised at what you find already posted online. You can also post/ask here and every scam-warner-anti-fraud-busting site you can find before taking a chance and losing money to a scammer.
If you google "cragislist buyer scam", "fake paypal email scam", "ebay escrow fraud" or something similar you will find hundreds of posts from victims and near victims of this type of scam.
Check out the one and only official paypal website, read up on what paypal does and how it really works.
SCAM
Scammers always say "the item" because they send that same email to everyone no matter what they are selling. And if you listed a price in the ad they wouldn't ask a final asking price. A real buyer would say "Is the bike still for sale. I would like to come look at it tomorrow. Here is my number"
Don't bother responding - it will be a typical fake check scam like this http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/C...
Most likely,
To find out you can do the following:
1)ask which item the person was interested in, ask if they were interested in a few items that you don't have for sale
2) if they say they are interested in something you didn't have for sale its a scam
3) if they say they weren't interested in the items you listed mention the item that you did have for sale and go from there.
Probably. If they were real, they would have said "the bike", not "the item".
Tell him that it's available for in person, CASH sales only.
No reason to think it's a scam although it could be. I'd respond. If you have dropped the price,say so, otherwise say price is $nnnn.
Email in response to my bike ad on craigslist. Probably a scam? Should I reply just to see for sure?
Copy of the email:
"Hey friend,is the item still for sale and what is the final asking price?
Thanks
Kevin"
