Anyone among my followers who knows scams, specifically money laundering through craigslist (or something like that)? Someone offered to buy something I listed and sent what appears to be a stolen check for 10X the amount…obvs not cashing it.
Bkgd: I offered a bike for sale on CL for $200 and someone replied with a full price offer + $50 to hold it. Said he would send a cashiers check (I should have stopped there but people are weird: why not PayPal/venmo?). Got email from Fedex to expect a package from Florida (!).
Package arrives with a business check — not a cashiers check — for $2,250 from a business in central Michigan. Immediately a text comes in to say the pkg has arrived, followed by an email. Thing is, I sold the bike locally for full price, as I told the scammer I would.
Now I guess I'll call this business on Monday and see if they are missing any checks or if they really can't find a serviceable bike locally for that kind of money. Blocked the scammer and I expect this is over. I should frame this radioactive check as a reminder to be smarter.
The third party (whose FedEx account was used to send the check) confirms it's a scam. So this may not be the first time this trick has been played. Ah, well, I think I passed a test here, in some small way.
It took me a minute to pretend I was @JimBrowning11 but I think I have the nut of this graft: it's the shipping. The item they wanted to "buy" was a token, and the check for almost 10 times the value was the barb of the hook. A check for $2000+ would get anyone's attention.
My threshold is far lower than that, though not as low as Donald Trump who would endorse a check for 5¢. The "shipper" was someone known to the scammer — a confederate, as Holmes would say — as they have already said.
So the play is for me to deposit a worthless check, pay some ridiculous price for shipping which they would expect in cash (untraceable) or some other means they could shut down before anyone tried to recall the funds.
They get the "shipping costs" which would hit my bank account once the worthless check was discovered and the deposit reversed. So the clues were right there: the sketchy terms (no one pays by cashiers check for a $200 item)…
The fact it was shipped overnight by a business with no record of the transaction (fake @FedEx airbill?) was another. And the fact it was a business check with nothing else in the envelope, nothing in the memo field, no note or anything.
The fact that there was nothing in the envelope and the item was not referred to by name in subsequent comms tells me this is a "fire and forget" scam…set up a whole bunch of these with burner emails and phones, see who takes the bait, and then see it you can get them to play.
And another red flag was that they wanted the ad taken down so no one else could take their token off the table…too late. I had another buyer already. As I say, people are weird so I'll humor them but this has been an education.
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