Scam?

I advertised a lounge for sale on Gumtree and within a few hours had received 2 emails from people which were written in very odd and poor English. One of them wanted to know lowest price without seeing it and the other said he wanted it as from the pictures, etc he could see it was what he wanted and said he was to busy, out of town, blah blah to view it and if I gave him my Paypal account he would pay immediately and arrange for a courier to collect it. When I said that I would prefer him to come see it first he said I should tell all other people it was sold and email him my account details immediately.......My gut instinct tells me this is very suss behaviour - has anyone else had experience of email addy [email protected]? I thought that Paypal was very secure in that once payment received it was ok but I am sure something isn't quite right here! Would appreciate thoughts/advice
Thanks

Paypal is basically a safe service. But the "transaction" wouldn't actually go through paypal.

The scammer plans to send you fake emails, supposedly from Paypal, but in reality sent from an entirely different email owned by the scammer. The emails will say that a payment has been made, but the money is on hold until you ship the item (or pay the shipper.) Of course this is not true--Paypal does not hold money or get in the middle of transactions like this.

If the scammer is after your item (often the case with small electronics or jewelry) the scammer will most likely send a paypal email for around the price of the item (he might make it a little higher, as "incentive" for taking the ad down. You will be told that you have to send a tracking number in order to have the payment released.

If the scammer is not after the item (which is true in most other cases) he will "pay" a lot more than the amount and say the extra is for shipping. He will refer you to his (fake) "shipper." Conveniently, the shipper will only be able to accept money via wire transfer. You will be told that your payment will be released once you have paid the shipper. In reality, of course, the scammer will collect the cash, and nobody will ever show up for the item, because the scammer was never after it.

In both cases, after you send the item or the cash, no money will appear in your paypal account, because none was ever sent.

Thanks for your reply Dotti, but I still don't 'get' it....even if you thought you had an email from Paypal saying funds were there (which was sent from fake address) surely if you check your actual Paypal account you would see that no funds were there and therefore you wouldn't release the item you were selling?

What you say is absolutely correct and sensible bubbles113. However many people using these services aren't so savvy and with enough pressure will give in against someone who appears to know what they're doing, and who expects to be dealing with a professional scammer ? Another poster here is being bombarded with phoney legal threats by someone who faced the same situation and it can be very intimidating.

The scammer isn't expecting a high success rate and only needs to convert 5% of his attempts to be making a very good living from sitting on his backside in an internet cafe drinking beer 3 days a week sending out hundreds of these mails.

Only if more people learn to avoid these scams and make it unprofitable to the scammer will the risk go away. The problem is that scammers adapt and devise new ploys.

The fact you avoided the scam is good news but the scammer won't have blinked an eye and will have moved on to his more promising victims.