Quote:
Originally Posted by Othen
... you are right about the prevalence of scams Dave, particularly on the internet. Someone tried to pull a clumsy scam on me regarding a motorbike I'm selling on eBay just a few days ago. It was a classified ad, someone got in touch asking whether they could pay by PayPal (which would have been fine by me, but I became suspicious). A few hours later I received an eBay message saying they had transferred the money and I should check my email inbox (particularly the spam mail box - even more suspicious) for the details.
Sure enough in my spam mail box there was an email entitled 'You've got money' and purporting to be from PayPal (actually an alias from 'customerverifiedcenter@accountant.com' - much more suspicious). I read the email with the preview software without opening it and could see it claimed to have transferred £1950 (the price of the bike was £1500) and asking me to send back £400 via MoneyGram with £50 to cover charges.
It was clearly a scam, and one would have to be a little foolish to fall for it (which does not mean that will not happen). I've reported it to the plod at ActionFraud, but I rather suspect it will go in the bin.
Ho hum.
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You're right Alan, that is a clumsy one but sadly so many people would be caught up in the excitement of having sold their item that they wouldn't stop to see the obvious red flags - if the "buyer" had a genuine PayPal account, you can simply do a partial refund without incurring any charges so no need to use a Moneygorm account or money for you to cover the costs involved. Also if he had the funds available to send the extra through with the PayPal payment, why didn't he just send the £400 in Moneygorm format to wherever himself, would have been quicker and easier.
From experience some years back when my credit card got scammed, ActionFraud don't usually bother investigating anything under ~£2k because it's not worth the manpower and they are too busy investigating larger frauds. Usually if there's an element of insurance (such as the credit card company reimbursing the victim) they will issue a crime reference number and that will be about it, unless it turns up as part of a much wider operation based on many small-scale scams rather than one big one. Sad but true and the amount i quoted may have changed now but i'm sure they said £2k at the time.