The last few weeks Daniel and I have been on the look out for a new car (we found one! pics on later post). About a week ago on KSL.com I thought I found an unbelievable deal on 2008 Volkswagon Passat. The original listing said it was for only $4,500 in Salt Lake City. Of course, I replied to that listing right away! The email the guy sent me explained in great depth why he was selling it so cheap....his mother has breast cancer and he is in need of fast cash to help pay for the surgery, the car is actually in New York and he's in Canada, and he explained that we will use eBay motors as an escrow service where they will hold the payment for the car until we receive it and approve and then only then will he receive payment. At the time I thought it sounded like a good idea since he was claiming to use a reputable company like eBay motors to watch over the account and guarantee the shipping. Plus, he sent a ton of believable photos of the car along with the email. Daniel on the other-hand was a bit more suspicious. I continued corresponding with the guy asking him questions about shipping and things and was pretty set on getting this car. We gave him our shipping address and he supposedly gave that to eBay motors to open an account for us. I received an "official" eBay motors email (in my spam mail) detailing how we were to send the payment. The email looked all official and eBay-like to me and it said we were to use Western Union to send the initial deposit of $1750 to some David guy who was to be our eBay motors agent. This made Daniel even more suspicious and he did some reading on the official eBay motors website. Well, this is where we KNEW that this was a big scam. According to eBay motors there are a lot of scams out there claiming to use eBay motors. EBay motors never uses Western Union or Money Gram in their money dealings and they never act as an escrow service for their sellers, ever. I was totally bummed, it was a total scam! But the bad thing was that I wanted it to be true so badly and I wanted to trust this guy so much that at the point where we read all of this info on eBay motors I was still giving this guy excuses. I told Daniel maybe he wasn't from the US and was using eBay incorrectly, but that it was still legitimate. Or maybe eBay motors makes some exceptions or something. Daniel finally looked at me and said, "honey, this guy is trying to take our money and hurt our family....do you want to try and trust him and let him do that?"
So Daniel wrote him an email back telling him off and that was that. I had always heard that there were tons of scams all over the online classified ads, but this was the first time I actually encountered one. Well, interestingly enough as I was looking some more on KSL and on craigslist, I found two more scam ads. They were just ads that sounded like a good deal and I emailed them about it. Then I got the same kind of story "oh, the car is in Washington or Illinois and I am trying to get money to pay for my taxes so my house doesn't get taken by the bank and I will ship the car to you if you pay me this...." This time I just emailed them back telling them "no thanks."
Have any of you guys run into scams like this?
1 comment:
Holy Cow, yes. My husband had been looking all summer long for housing in or around Washington DC for this internship he's doing and we found scam after scam. They would all say they had a place for an extremely good deal, but none of them lived in the country. They had to leave for this reason or that...right. So frustrating. We just looked for housing when we got out here. By the by, if you are still struggling lugging your baby around because she is a momma's girl :), go to this website: www.wearyourbaby.com. I couldn't have lived without it!
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