2009-08-28 22:00:08

My Encounter With A CraigsList Scammer

It was a dark and dreary day in Johnstown. I sit in my cubicle, soaking wet from my recent trek to the doctor's office. I notice that my GMail tab in Firefox shows 1 new message, so I go and see that it's a reply to a post I made on CraigsList trying to sell one of my camera lenses. I open the email and read this: The email was from Generic Stores <genericstores@googlemail.com>. This immediately tripped my brain's scam sensor for a couple reasons:

1. The name is Generic Stores
2. The domain is googlemail.com instead of gmail.com
• Even though googlemail.com is valid for GMail, no one uses it
3. The wording seems odd

I showed this email to a coworker and he noticed that the second sentence uses the word "will" instead of "would". I didn't notice that at first, but now I really think this is a scammer. But, I give this "Alan" the benefit of the doubt. He might just be a retard. I don't know. So I perform my own little turing test by sending him an email with a question/statement that a bot probably wouldn't answer too well. His reply was actually good. It was clear that this was an actual human and not some bot. So, continuing to give this person the benefit of the doubt, we work out how much next day shipping would cost and I sent him a money request from Paypal. Within minutes, I get this email in my inbox:

Now, at the time of me receiving this email, I was at the chiropractor so I was working off of my phone. And even on a large screen, this email looks dead on. This guy took his time. My mail client even showed service@paypal.com as the sender. Ok, I'm a little more convinced. But, I'm not completely convinced. I called PayPal support and asked them to confirm that the payment was made. They said that it was not. So I emailed "Alan" back, told him that the payment wasn't made yet, and asked him to make the payment before I ship the lens.
Twice we go back and forth with him saying I should have the confirmation email in my inbox and me saying it's not there. Some time passed; I ate supper with my family and finally made my way home. I got on my desktop, opened the email, and checked out the headers: So, I was looking for where this message originated. If this was a real email from PayPal saying that the payment was sent the first (bottom-most) "Received" line in the headers should be a PayPal email server. This email came from a loopback address, which is impossible: Since I didn't think that looked right, I looked for the next server in the loop: So this guy didn't cover his tracks well at all. It's obvious that the email did NOT originate from PayPal, but from inbox.com, which I have never heard of before. It was at this point that I was 100% sure this entire charade was a scam and I sent "Alan" this email: Here's the lesson. If I wasn't a "computer guy" and understood how email works, I would have been fooled by this. Everything looked 100% legit. If you're dealing with selling an item through CraigsList to someone who is not local, be careful. If you have any thoughts that something might be wrong, find someone who knows what they're doing to examine the emails.

NOTE: Yes, the footer of the "confirmation" email telling me to get 5GB of email from inbox.com should have given it away that it was a scam, however I was on my phone at the time and didn't see that. If you get these emails on your computer, look at the entire message for odd things like this.

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