Reduce the chance of getting scammed

[JeffRaines]

Do they use words not commonly used. Think to yourself. Does the average person speak like this? In 32 years, I have never had someone ask me to “kindly send them money” that was legitimate.

If you scroll your junk mail, I see this ALL THE TIME. I get messages claiming to be from different credit card companies asking me to "kindly" reply to the offers. The word "kindly" is a direct indication its a scam.

While were talking about scammers - fun fact. Did you know that the bad grammar and misspellings in the old "Nigerian prince" emails were intentional? To make a long story short, the scammers figured out that if someone kept responding to those emails they were far more likely to follow through with sending them money vs. people responding to perfect grammar who wouldn't fall for it.

 

[DuckDogDr]

I had an instance (not on here) where I had a WTB thread on 2 or 3 different waterfowl forums for a particular type of boat

Had similar response from 3 different user names almost instantaneous. At first I thought guy just didn’t get his user name choice , but then the pics were all the exact same one on google main page.

I figured something was up and sellers would only ship .. I couldn’t come inspect the boat.

Did get lucky and found a retired Marine that was moving from commiefornia to back to Alabama and didn’t have use for it . Good shape and gave me a good price

 

[CorbLand]

Going to pop this back up to the top.

The latest and greatest is the text scams. You post saying you will take something and you get a text from the member with payment information. It is most likely not the person you are intending to buy the item from. If you have posted your phone number on the open forum, anyone can find it.

Go search your name and your phone number and delete it if you have ever posted it. It could be from 10 years ago.
People stop posting your information for the world to see.




All I had to do to find about 10 members phone numbers in 2 minutes was search the word TEXT in the classifieds. I am not a scammer, its not my job and I found them that easy.

 

[fngTony]

@CorbLand thanks for posting up the search instructions. Two things I want to add to that is for people to also search the last four of your number. The system doesn’t populate for multiple formats of your whole number but will pick a specific number set out of your comments. For example searching “111-333-7777” won’t pull it up if you originally typed it as “(111)-333-7777” but searching “7777” will show up no matter what.
Secondly for anyone who did this prior to the recent site update, do it again. I noticed that the search feature now shows comments you typed on someone’s profile and private messages where it used to only search the public forums.