I feel bad - use caution

[Aerodon]

Twice other spacers have been scammed by someone masquerading as me. Once for an item I was not even selling.  The private messaging system is fairly secure, but at some point a seller has to provide a phone number, email address or real address for payment.

I think what happens is the scammer sees someone posting interest in an article and then jumps on your user name to provide an email to take the correspondence offline.

 

Please use caution and do some cross checking before sending money.

 

Aerodon

Donald Hague

 

 

 

[Alan Fox]

Don , why on earth , would someone send money ,  without recourse ..  If the seller won't use PayPal , its a scam...If they want to do friends and family , its a scam..  Its that simple... If they are trying to save 3% , then its on them , not you... Buyers , PAY ATTENTION... When we (Sellers) ask for 3% extra to cover banking fees , IT PROTECTS YOU , noy us...

[Zippy_Bird]

Hi All,

I recently had two separate attempts by scammers on MooneySpace to lure me into a trap. Because they were so close in time I made some observations on their techniques. This is what I noted. I hope others find this helpful:

Firstly, they started chasing me only after I posted a question to a real classified thread. This leads me to believe that once a legit seller posts an advertisement the scammer “follows it” to receive auto notifications. Then once a member (like me) posts a question to a real ad the scammer gets auto-notified of a potential target and goes to work quickly.

Secondly, and this is were its gets dirty, the scammer private messages a member target with a link to the original forum ad and subject line and text content in such a way that it looks like the member target is getting a legit response to a real question they just asked in the forum. Some nice words accompany a phone number, and with that they hijack the conversation. Please know It can look convincing. Had they not made a grammar error on the first attempt I may not have paused to reassess the communication.

Folks may have different thoughts on how best to deal with this but I plan to:

1) private message sellers directly with any questions I have about an ad rather than posting those questions on the classifieds thread for a scammer to see. 2) when I post an ad I will explicitly tell folks to PM me directly and to not post questions on the ad. 3) I will delete old ads and repost as necessary versus bumping ads to break the thread following feature the scammer needs to target folks.

Thanks for reading, Good luck out there!

Z


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[hammdo]

I too usually just pm the seller directly - if they are supporter and been here a while. Just don’t post on the advert your interest…

-Don