am i about to be ripped off, lucky escape. !!!!

i am currently selling a camper van, and have been contacted twice by the same person, the email reads as follows :-

Urgent Response.?
From: CAN Abel ([email protected]) THIS IS HIS REAL EMAIL
Sent: 31 March 2010 10:05:40
To: XXX removed name of innocent party - dotti
Dear Friend,

I have received your mail , I am going to pay cash to you for the car and i have accepted the price, but here in Iraq we have no means of sending cash to any other country because as a military man, we are not allowed to operate with any bank in Iraq due to the war going on, so since I have been deployed to come and work in another country military base soonest, I will like to work with you on 100% trust so that i will send the cash to you through our only secured delivery means which is Diplomatic courier service.

I hope you will acknowledge this means of payment and inform me your willingness so that we can forge ahead.

I awaits your response,

Can.

After looking on your site, i noticed the name " diplomatic courier service" come up, obviously this man (or low life scammer) has no details other than my email, and phone number, but he has contacted me through a secure car selling site, if this is a scam surely they need to be notified ?, his email is at the top, as i just pasted the whole thing from my inbox, please advise....... many thanks XXX

Welcome to Scamwarners.
Can I start by suggesting you edit your name (twice) and email address from your post. We don't need them, and it's better to be anonymous.
That's undoubtedly a scam. It won't be the scammer's real name of course, and there's no way of keeping scammers off sites like the one you advertised your van on. Report him and have him removed, and he'll probably return under a new ID.

Hi Demolition Man and Welcome.

In line with Arnold's request for you to remove your personal information I have made several edits to help keep you anonymous, it serves no useful purpose to identify you.

The scam you were involved with is more than likely run by a Nigerian, most of the car buying scammers are.

This thread viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5879 outlines one of the latest methods used to convince car sellers to send money to them, I am presuming it will closely match the emails you have received.

If you have any questions, please ask

I believe I was editing your post while others were responding!

As already stated, this is a definite scam. There would be "fees" associated with the diplomatic courier, or a problem would occur. The end result is that you would ultimately be asked to wire money in order to get paid for the camper (which the scammer has no real interest in--it is not being shipped to Africa, where the scammer is. He will respond to any item with a high enough price tag that the seller might take the risk of sending a few hundred bucks to get the promised cash). There is such a thing as a diplomatic courier, but diplomatic couriers are actually employed by government to carry important government-related documents. They do not carry money for individuals, contrary to what many scammers would like you to believe.

As Arnold already said, you can report this scammer to the car site, but the truth is, he will create a new name and a new email address in less than 5 minutes (he probably already has another fake identity ready to go) and he will continue without missing a beat.

Oh look! A mod fight!

^^ Nah

It is a good problem to have but sometimes 2 mods will be fixing the same thing at the same time, in the case of editing, once you open a post and start editing, you have no idea of what has happened with that post until it is edited, the second edit will always overide the first.

Our edits were much the same so no problem here

Now, are you going to share that popcorn

hi there again, sorry about the name and email errors, but this git has contacted me again, get this for entertainment value, i will string him along, and at the right time, send him a picture of my scrotum haha !!!
his new and urgent email, reads as follows :-

Dear Friend,

I have received your mail which you sent to me that you have concerning my last mail to you , I do not want you to be confused or surprise with this deal which i am about to reveal to you now. I have a good business proposal which i want to reveal to you as i can see that you are a responsible person, I am CAPTAIN Can Abel a member of the U.S. ARMY USARPAC Medical Team, which was deployed to Iraq at the beginning of the war in Iraq. I believe you will maintain the trust and confidence of what i am about to reveal to you to enable me send you the cash and have my car as soon as i live here .I will take care of all courier delivery expense from here until the diplomat will contact you .I have in my possession the sum of USD10.2million which was recovered from one of our raids on terrorists here in Iraq because they keep most of their money at home for evil activities which they normally get through illegal deals on crude oil.I cannot call you because the security here is very tight and we are monitored and warned not to make outside calls.

Based on the suffering we undergo here some of us do meet such luck. It happened that I went for this raid and I decided to take it as my share for my stress here in this evil land filled with suicide bombers. I deposited this box of money with RED CROSS OFFICE here informing them that i am making contact for the real owner of the box. It is now under my power to approve whoever comes forth for this money. I wish to use this money to pay for your car and also for charity purposes in Turkey,where we have about 3 million Iraqi refugees and Sudan where we have currently the highest numbers of refugees displaced as a result of war.I will not go to the states because i had a signal to travel to Europe to work in a military base very soon.

You need to visit such places.I want to invest the money on stock fish from Norway to this refugees because base on my experience on battle ground in this places,they lack a lot of fish and meat to add to their meager and unpalatable meals which they get in little quantity just to keep them living until God knows when the problem ends. Instead of allowing this terrorists to get the money and spend it on purchasing arms illegally from Russia and North Korea it is better channeled to saving the world. I cannot move this money to the United states because I will be in Europe for about 3years,so I need someone I could deal with on trust and that is why i contacted you. If you accept, I will put you forward as the owner of the box and deliver the money to you in your country through the delivery means from here because as a uniformed person and I cannot be parading such an amount so I need to present someone as the owner.

I am an American and an intelligence officer and I have a 100% authentic means of transferring the money through diplomatic courier service .I just need your acceptance and all is done.I have the logistics for that so you have nothing to worry. Please if you are interested in this transaction then I will give you the complete details you need for us to carry out this transaction successfully as all you need is to follow my instructions and directives. I believe I can trust you. Where we are now we can only communicate through our military communication facilities which is secured so nobody can monitor our emails,then I can explain in details to you. I will only be able reach you through email,because our calls might be monitored,I just have to be sure whom I am dealing with.

If you are interested, then let me know so we can proceed as time is very important to me. I am doing this on trust,you should understand that as a trained military expert I am a very careful person. This money is my life and i am willing to give you 30% of the total sum when the money arrives under your safe custody. I wait for your response so we can proceed immediately.

In less than 7days the box of money should be in your safe custody, then i will come over to meet you when we are out of the military base.

Regards,
Captain Can Abel.

Basically, this scammer has taken an "item for sale" scam and turned into a standard 419 "Saddam's millions" scam!

What you are doing (stringing him along) is called scambaiting, and we don't recommend doing that when the scammer has your real life information. You can find lots of information about scambaiting, as well as many tools to really cause a deserving lad some grief, on our sister site at www.419eater.com

Removed quote of above post - Ralph


what do you mean real life information, he has my email (off the site) and phone number (off the site)
please clarify

You might be surprised what googling your email address might show about you. While he strikes you as an idiot, he is a criminal with no concern about his victims.
It's safer to create an email address especially for baiting, and reply from that. He won't notice that he didn't email it.

An email and phone number are enough to get you harrassed by an angry scammer, and often those can be used to get even more information. Scammers can get quite angry if they figure out you have been messing with them. While your scammer is sitting in Africa and is not likely to turn up on your doorstep, he can still cause you a headache. We have seen scammers retaliate in lots of ways. For example, the email address allows them to cause problems by putting victims on dozens of spam lists, spoofing their email addresses when sending out scams by the thousands (so you get to deal with hundreds of bounces and angry responses); getting baiters' or victims' email accounts closed--in all cases you may lose your email or the account may become pretty much unusable. These or other attacks on your email can cause a bit of a headache for you.

Scammers have done other, more serious things such as: using baiters' or victims' names/addresses/phone numbers in their scams (there is a thread here on SW with several posts by a victim who was bombarded with angry phone calls, letters, emails, accusations, and was reported to the police by several victims because an angry scammer had his mule put her address as the return address on several fake check shipments--when the victims realized they had lost money, they started harassing her); or using their info to set up scam profiles. On top of this, death threats and curses are fun trophies for baiters, but can be a little unnerving when the scammer knows who you are. There are other examples, but I'll stop here. The end result is that cleaning up the mess can waste your time and cause you grief. In general, it's better to drop a scammer if he has any of your real info to avoid these complications.

Baiters use completely fake information--this way if the scammer tries any of these things, it can't affect them. We may lose an email address here and there, but it won't affect us too much, and our personal and professional reputations remain intact.