Online Scammers

[Kandy-Sugar]

I had a good look and couldn't find anything to do with this topic so sorry if there is anything out there I've overlooked. >.<

How many of you have been scammed by online scammers?

I had just listed up our car for sale on ebay a few days ago and the next morning at 3am we get a message asking for more details on the car and if we could email them on their email address.

I thought it was weird that they sent the message so early considering it wasn't listed for worldwide buyers, only Australia.

Anyway, so I found out the next day from Steve that he had two more people text him the same sort of message asking for more details etc.

We didn't think it was weird just yet though. We thought they were genuine buyers.

So we emailed them all back that night and they all wanted my paypal email address to put funds into and they would all send their 'personal couriers' to collect the car.

That's when I was like, uh yeah right. You really want to buy a $10,000 car when you haven't even looked at it?

They all apparently worked out at sea too which was there reason for not seeing the car first.

I looked up paypal scammers on the internet and everything they had said to me in their emails was what they were warning people about on this website.

Basically they ask you for your paypal email address, then say they are putting funds into your account. You see the funds go into your paypal account, but before you have time to process those funds back into your bank account, they've already come to collect your car and cancelled their credit card payment into your account so you have no car and no money. 0_o

So I email them all back again and tell them that if they really want to use paypal then they can buy it now through ebay for sercurity reasons so I have ebay to back me up if anything goes down. (I knew that they wouldn't do that anyway).

They responded to me again asking for my email address again and that was when I basically told them to get lost and that I knew they were scammers etc and that I was sick of people like them wasting my time and trying to steal my money etc.

They never replied to that. XD

Anyone else out there had anything like this happen to them before?
Any close calls or actual times you've been scammed online?

 

[der Astronom]

They don't happen to me because Gmail is good about the spam and usually puts them away where I can't see it. But for some reason, the other e-mails about winning the lottery or about offering you money just seem way too obvious to me anyways; there have been entire websites devoted to ratting them out and wasting their time. I believe you can find them by googling "419 scam" or something similar.

I recently received a scam e-mail in my university e-mail, saying that I've reached the e-mail limit, and in order to get more space, I was supposed to click on a link and fill out some information. It was already suspicious enough to me that my e-mail inbox was full because I think they gave me quite a bit of space, and I don't send a lot of e-mails anyways. A quick glance at the actual limit also told me it could have been a scam. I looked at the link anyways out of curiosity, and it happened to be a survey page, asking for your account details. I found out that the survey page was hosted by an independent party, and their terms of service were probably not intended to be used by scammers, so I reported the guy to prevent other people from being duped. I got a reply from them saying they removed the guy's survey.

Not so recently, someone was going around trying to get people to supply their username and password on DeviantArt (I forget exactly what it was about though). I almost got fooled, but then I remembered reading a friend's journal about it, so I changed my password, and nothing happened.

 

[Noize]

Well on my part, i can't say anything like that's happened to me, Although this HAS happened to my dad.

You know those scam e-mails you get saying "You've won $10,000,000", or some woman/man asking for your bank account details because their late husbands died and they need you to "Secure their funds from their will" ect?

Well my dad happened to come across an e-mail from some sheila from Romania. He had been talking to her for a few months, and they were "getting to know eachother" through E-mails.

One night, my dad started talking to me and my sister about "having another mother" ect and started tellin us about how this woman "wants to move to Australia to be with us".

At that moment i just started laughing real hard.

Few days later she send an E-mail asking for money, so she'd have the money to come over. Obviously dad had instantly agreed to send her money, so what does he do? He comes straight over to me and asks me if i had 1-200 to spare. I told him that she's a bloody scammer, but did he listen? No. I did end up giving it to him, but my dad is pretty intimidating. >.>

Anyways, he sends the money over to her account, few days laterm, when the money had been successfully transfered, what happens? The woman goes poof. The woman shuts her E-mail account (which was his only contact with her).

Needless to say, she got him pretty good, although i did get my money back from him.

Whenever a scammer tried to contact me, i just act like a pervert. gets em everytime

 

[Tyler Breeze]

Luckily I have not been scammed online. However I do have a very big fear of it happening. That's why I don't use websites like Ebay or craigslist. No matter how safe they claim to be. I'll stick to items sold directly by Amazon.

Now mom on the other hand, she could see something like this..

"free money! Only 35.99"

She would buy it without a second thought. So that's a bit of a problem.

Anyway, maybe I'm too safe? Nah.