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Never trust a geologist from Portugal.

Just like many other people, I have browsed craigslist looking for a good deal. Recently a friend of mine mentioned he was looking for a new car, so we started browsing the Cars & Trucks section to see if there were any bargins to be had. I quickly came across a deal that just had to be too good to be true:

A 2006 Chrysler 300C SRT-8, in what looks to be very good condition, for only $3800. It must be my lucky day. The advertisement lists “Nevada” as its location, and the only method of contact is by email. If you notice the background in the pictures, it looks very green to be Las Vegas. Also, the entire ad appears to be one big image file. Clearly there is something sketchy going on, and I’m sure this isn’t the first advertisement like this on craigslist since they have banners and warnings all over their site about fraud.

However, craigslist warns about people shipping cars and clearly the advertisement says that the car is in Nevada. So I thought I’d have a little fun and contact the “seller” to see what’s going on here. I jumped over to gmail and created a new account. Name: Ross Jefferson, Email: rossylovescars@gmail.com. Then I used my new account to contact our seller, making sure to use wording verbatim from the posting.

After only a few minutes, I received a response.

His email raises all the classic craigslist scam flags. A price that is too good to be true, he is in Portugal but the car is in Detroit, he will pay shipping, and he would like to use eBay as an escrow service (despite the fact that the car isn’t being sold on eBay). Someone seriously shopping for a car should stop here, delete the email, and flag the craigslist post. I’m interested in seeing what would happen if I play along so I continued to chat with “Daniel”. I copied the VIN number he provided and came across something interesting on a google search.

It looks like all the pictures in the ad were scraped from a legitimate car sales site, complete with other information about the car. I emailed Daniel back to see what he would say.

Daniel quickly replied.

It seems like the transaction would go through very easily. eBay would handle the payment, he pays for shipping, and if I don’t like the car I send it back. In order to keep the conversation going, I needed to provide him with a shipping address. I didn’t want to use my own, so I came up with the next best thing.

It was interesting and a little scary that there was actually someone on the other end reading my emails and replying. At first I thought that this was all some automated system replying with standard responses. But when I asked a question, I actually got a response.

Just as he described, 3 hours later I received some very official looking emails from “eBay” about my new purchase.

I was welcomed to eBay Motors and they reiterated how I would be protected through this entire process.

Something else to note, was that the actual message with the directions for payment was filtered by gmail’s spam filter. They even take that into account by sending the following email from “eBay Support”

Once I removed the purchase directions from my spam folder, I saw the action that would kiss my $3800 goodbye. Western Union.

Upon further inspection of these “eBay” emails, I noticed that they actually did not even come from eBay at all.

So what have we learned? If something seems too good to be true, more than likely it is. Craigslist is doing their best to warn users about scams, but you need to use some common sense to protect yourself. I had a little fun researching for this post, and I hope that it helps someone protect their money. In the end, I have learned to never trust a geologist from Portugal.

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