Nigerian Con Artists

[nimbu]

Best mate put his car up for sale in the loot. He had a guy send him an email asking if he was willing to ship the car to Nigera. A bit confused he asked me if it can be done.

I suggested he tell the guy that

1) The buyer would have to pay for the car with a UK drawn Bankers Draft.
2) Have the car collected by a bonded shipper (I suggested one as the company i worked for has sent stuff out there before).
3) The buyer would have to pay the shipper once the car arrived in order to release it.

So mate replied with the above. Heard nothing. Two weeks later there was a withdrawal from his savings account for 500 Euros made in Dublin with the persons name who replied to the email as a note.

The money was returned by the bank, and to this day we still dont know how they did it.

Nims

[eloquence]

I had one try to buy a PDA off me... I tried to get them to actually part with the money for delivery - and a UPS person turned up to pick it up without checking whether it was a valid pickup... when I'd already enquired with UPS to check that it was prepaid and they'd said no... so UPS weren't much help... naturally, they'd sent a fake Western Union payment for the PDA, and claimed that the money would be released on receipt of the shipment.

Unfortunately I didn't manage to get the guy to actually pay for shipping - he just kept insisting that the pickup was legitimate and he'd prepaid for it, etc, even when I said I'd checked with UPS and they'd given me my own details for who was paying... only managed in wasting an amount of his own time, until he finally got suspicious and just stopped communicating... at least by that point I had a delivery address to forward for fraud investigation purposes.
I'd recommend if anyone does get someone try to buy their phone (using Buy It Now or the like) that then turns out to be a Nigerian con artist, that you stay in contact long enough to get a delivery address, and then forward that on to Western Union (presuming they've sent a fake payment to imitate Western Union), eBay, the police, etc. If you can, try to get a contact number that you can call them on, too.