Craigslist Sale Is Suspicious

I posted an ad on Craigslist trying to sell my wedding dress. I receieved the following message,
"is your item available and in good condition for sale?" from a user with a gmail address. I responded that it was in excellent condition and immediately available. The response I receieved was, "Good and nice hearing from you and the only problem is the lady(my spouse) am willing to buy this item for her wedding ceremony ain't here with me in the state,she just got promoted and transferred by the United Nations where she works,So i will ask you if you can help me get this this item shipped out to her through the postal service express mail international ems 8 days delivery, And also i will offer you $460 for the item including the shipping fees down to her and i will prefer to pay you by pay pal or money order cause i wont be able to pick the item up, All you need to do for me now is to get back to me with your pay pal account e mail address and name or your money order info so that i can pay you off on time and if you don't seems to have an account i will advise you to sign up for a pay pal account it is very useful...........Thank you for your time.................."

I set up a paypal account because I had heard that fraudulent or stolen money orders were being use by some scammers and thought the paypal security might be a deterrent if this guy was up to no good. I sent the man an invoice via email and he processed a payment through paypal. I received a notification email from paypal stating that the funds had been deducted from his account and were approved, but that for security reasons, I would have to provide a tracking number for the package before my account would be credited for the purchase. I then received an email containing the following address:
Address........No 7,Ajetumobi street,
City............... Osogbo
State................. Osun
Zipcode............. 234035,
Country...............Nigeria
The package was a bit too large to send via Express Mail to Nigeria so I was looking into sending it via FedEx. The FedEx employee said that the address and city did not match and that the city was misspelled.

What I'm trying to figure out is if this is a scam, why would he purposely direct me to use a secure payment site like paypal?? Is this a scam and if so...do I need to be worried about my bank account even though the transaction was through paypal???

Hi, and welcome to Scamwarners.
That's quite a common Craigslist scam. The first email referred to "the item" as it was sent out on bulk . It was only when he replied to you that he actually mentioned what you were selling.
The email supposedly from Paypal was a fake, and if you check with Paypal, you'll find that no payment has been credited to your account.
Were you asked to send some of the payment to someone else by Western Union? Sometimes the scammer is after what you are selling, but this seems unlikely for a wedding dress, Especially after giving you a false address.
I can't see that your bank accunt details are at risk. It's not something that Paypal would reveal to the scammer. Even if he has been in touch with them (which he hasn't).

Thanks for your reply Arnold. I actually called paypal security services immediately after posting my topic here, and they confirmed what you are saying. There have been no payments made. I forwarded the emails I received to their fraud detection account so maybe they can track this guy down. Fortunately I had changed my password and log in information right before I called them, as I was already worried about being phished - so the representative told me that my account AND my bank account should be perfectly safe. There have been no attempts to access the account from anyone besides myself.

I wasn't asked to send any payments, and I agree, it's doubtful that a Nigerian man REALLY wanted my used wedding dress that badly, so I have no idea what he thought he was going to accomplish. Oh well...potential financial crisis averted and a lesson learned!

In this case your accounts are safe, the scam will come in when you are asked to pay the courier (which will be the same scammer)

The next step may well be emails appearing to be from Craigslist and or Paypal insisting you need to send the dress / money / refund to prevent them taking action.

Your best course of action is to ignore all future emails, if you absolutely must reply, make it simple;

"I have sold the item locally"

If you do have any more details could you please post them, be sure to leave out your own information and if you have any otehr questions, please feel free to ask.

As Arnold duggested, I doubt very much the scammer had any interest in the dress but you never know, he may be getting married and stealing a dress to show his love for his bride

First Email I recieved from a Kenny James (Email:kenjay2586 at gmail dot com) was a response for my Craigslist listing for a laptop:
------001-------
is your item still available?
1,What is the current status of the package..?
2,What is your firm price, though am okay with the listing price..?
3,Do you have the receipt for it ..?
------END-------

As soon as I responded, I got a second email
------002-------
>> Good and nice hearing from you.....i will like to know.....What type
>>>>> of payment do you accept as a seller even though i will add an
>>>>> extra dollars to cover the shipping because am currently not local
>>>>> at the moment, Am out of town to visit my nephew that is in AZ and
>>>>> i would like to purchase it for my cousin as a christmas gift..
>>>>>
>>>>> I have a pay pal account can pay you via that right away .If you
>>>>> do not have a PayPal account, you can do so by going to
>>>>> http://www.PayPal.com <http://www.paypal.com/><http://www.paypal.com/>and
>>>>>
>>>>> set up your account it is free,easy and guarantee transaction
>>>>> safety.Once you send me money request, I will send you the payment
>>>>> for your item as well as $100 USD to covers shipping via UNITED
>>>>> STATES POSTAL SERVICE PRIORITY MAIL.And please will need pics for
>>>>> visual assessment I would be glad if my request is favorably
>>>>> considered.
>>>>> Get back to me asap.
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks
------END------------

and another one...
--------003------------
Kindly send me your name asap so that i can make the payment.Moreso,Fedex will be more costly so i will want you to ship it through the USPS(UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE) EXPRESS MAIL INTERNATIONAL(EMS SPEEDPOST).thanks
---------END-------------

I smelt something fishy but played along and he asked me for my Paypal address and I emailed my paypal address to him... Soon I got 3 emails, two from a "service" and one from a "spoof" at paypal dot com.
----------004---------
***NOTIFICATION OF PAYMENT BY KENNY JAMES(kenjay2586 at gmail.com) FOR YOUR AUCTION ITEM TRANSACTION ID 5Y758872CS5636209 PayPal***(C826-L003-Q999-T5365) ROUTINE CODE CONFIRMED***
----------005---------
*** PAYMENT IS CONFIRMED *** SHIPPING DETAILS IS REQUIRED BEFORE WE POST FUNDS INTO YOUR ACCOUNT ***
----------006---------
***SHIPMENT UPDATE NEEDED FOR YOUR AUCTION ITEM TRANSACTION ID 5Y758872CS5636209 CONFIRMED***
----------END----------
As if the paypal look and feel wasn't fishy enough, the from addresses were "americaservices007 at gmail dot com; on behalf of; service at paypal dot com [paypalcareline at mail2economist.com]"

I sent him an email the next day saying "I am still waiting for payment. I logged into my paypal account this morning and didnt see any payments" his response was:
-------007------------
"Thanks for your response..Didnt you paypal customer care notify you about the payment i made?"
----------END----------

I sent him a Paypal Payment Request and notified him that I had sent him a request.
His response was:
----------008-----------
Yes.i believe paypal would have send you the notification email.thanks
----------END-----------

What a low-life! I'm just feeling bad for the poor moms and dads who'd get ripped off by this @$$hole.

I wanted to post this out there for anyone who might go through the same experience. Would google let us do an IP trace on where this guy logs in and sends his emails from??? Somebody needs to stop this NOW.

Welcome vikramjairam.

I'm glad you didn't fall for this scam. We allso apreciate that you posted your email exchange here so others can be warned.
Education is the best way to fight them. The more people know how these scams work the less victims there will be. Google hides the IP address of the sender of the email so it's hard to trace, but when the scammer tells you where to send the item then that's a good indication of where the scammer lives.

Hi Vikram

Thank you for posting, people get scammed for a variety of reasons, some may say it is through ignorance, this is not true in almost all cases, the people doing the scamming are very good at what they do, it's their job and they have had loads of practice.

Educating others about scams and how to avoid them is the best way to stop the scammers, spread the word, tell your friends and family, you never know who you may save from being scammed.

Welcome vikramjairam,

I'm glad you caught on to the fact that this person was attempting to scam you before you lost anything.

When you post a scammer's information, you don't need to hide or edit the email address--in fact, we would prefer a scammer's email address be written as-is, so that another potential victim who thinks to search on the email (in this case [email protected] ) will be led here.

Just wanted to let you all know that [email protected] is still out there. I just posted an add on Craigslist this afternoon and almost as soon as it was posted I was contacted by [email protected]. This time they texted me and played it off as they were a service person overseas. I was immediately suspicious so I started researching. Thank you all for your previous posts, it may have save me a lot of money!