Craigslist SCAM! Nothing new...just a heads' up

[mrreindeer]

Originally Posted by JKVR6M69

buy sell or meet somone ends up being a scam

Well....I did place an ad for Go-Go girls once for a Halloween party I throw with my friends and while the gals we chose ended up flaking and got their naked bodies painted for some other party, we were inundated with some very rewarding photos (of job applicants as well as the body painting as our consolation prize)!

[bxcarracer]

haha I wish I was able to afford sum go go girls man,

[orca99usa]

A little variation on this scam: I listed a computer printer for sale in the local newspaper. I got an e-maill from someone who said he wanted to send me a check for the item, and he wanted the name and address to send it to. This sounded innocuous enough. The check never arrived. The guy kept sending e-mails to see if we had gotten his check (he knew we hadn't). About two weeks later we got a call from a music shop in Omaha, NE saying that someone was trying to order a $10K violin in our name and have it shipped to Nigeria. He said that they were trying to split it between two credit cards. He read the account numbers back and neither one was ours. Apparently the scammer was using our name and address and attaching it to two stolen credit card numbers. The music store owner explained that because of all the fraud going on, many merchants do not sell to anyone unless they have a valid US mailing address.

[mrreindeer]

nice.......jeez....these guys....

[Mike22Tor]

For several months I have been advocating engaging these scammers and trying to get them to send me 3 or 4 emails that are not of the "form letter" variety.

The reason is that I figured if others would do this as well, the amount of time the scammer would have to spend answering our emails would severly cut into the amount of time he could spend running his scam.

The numbers work in our favor because the scammer has to send out hundreds of emails before he finds a few victims who will actually fall for his scams. If only ten percent of those people would engage him and get him to write emails that would take perhaps 5 or 10 minutes of his time, then the amount of time he would have to spend would equate to almost a full day's worth of his time.

But I have abandoned that approach now for a far more effective and direct approach.

Considering that these people spam my email accounts, I have developed some tools that spam their email accounts in return, and make it very difficult for them to conduct business.

Now this kind of spamming requires a very discerning approach. There are many factors involved. For example, it would be a waste of my time if it was easy for the scammer to identify my emails and just delete them in a few seconds. So, they have to look like ordinary emails coming from his target victims. They have arrive at times and time intervals that would be appropriate. Finally they cannot be easily identified as spam emails. In other words, they can't all come from the same email ID or even the same email supplier - such as "xxx@free.email.com"

There are many other intricate requirements and I'd kind of like to help other people who would like to do the same sort of thing. But I'm unsure as to the best way to do that. I have written some software that sends massive amounts of email to these people that arrive spread out over the course of a day and that would be one thing that I'd be willing to share.

Naturally, great care must be taken not to actually spam innocent people. At the very least, they could complain to our ISP's resulting in the cancellation of our Internet service.

But if they are actually inviting us to email them, then much of that problem is easily handled. And if it can be demonstrated that they are actual scammers attempting to cheat innocent victims out of their money, then it becomes very difficult for them to complain about getting spammed in return.

I'm not at all sure how to proceed. I've run my software only a few times but the results have been extremely enjoyable and highly effective. All in all, I'd like to hear from some other people as to what your opinions might be of this method to strike back at the scammers.

[mrreindeer]

I love it Mike...I'd be happy to participate in your program!

Now, I've been told a lot of these scammers use 'bots' or automatic programs themselves but how do they know if an email is a sucker? So I do believe a human being has to go through the emails at some point. It can't all be done by computer.