Zing owns a nice MacBook Pro that we aren’t using, so rather than just have it sit and gather dust, I figured I’d sell it. Craigslist is the easiest way to sell stuff like that, so I put together a nice brief ad on Saturday and waited for a buyer.
It turns out I didn’t have to wait long for the scammers to pounce. Within a few hours I had five or six of them, all texting me asking about the laptop. What’s funny is they all use the same formula:
1) Send text with a brief greeting and the name of the item from Craigslist.
2) Regardless of my response, they respond with a short story about how they’re out of town and want to buy this MacBook for a nephew or brother-in-law or whatever. Of course I’ll have to ship it to that person. They’ll pay an exorbitant rate for shipping ($100-200 above the asking price).
3) If I respond to that, they jump into something about using PayPal and conducting the deal as soon as possible.
I think after another response, the bot (or whatever computer software is handling this) notifies an actual human to take over. I’m guessing they figure at that point if the sucker is still engaged, they need to act like a real person. I figured that was the point where I needed to start getting weird.
Sadly, despite the absolutely adorable puppy photo, this scammer didn’t want to continue the conversation.
I used the approach again on someone else:
At least this guy acknowledged how cute the puppy was, but apparently decided to give up on the scam.
All of this would be funny if it wasn’t so sinister. Scams like this must be successful to some degree, or people wouldn’t use them (and in such volume! I had the same guy actually contact me twice even after I called him out as a scammer). I figure there’s a special circle in hell for low-lifes who do this kind of thing.