rootninja

is Obvious

When you put a car or truck for sale on Craigslist almost immediately you start receiving messages from beginner trolls low balling you or asking you to pay hundreds of dollars to “guarantee the sale.”

These guys are the bottom feeders, probably scamming grandma out of her Grand Marquis quite easily. You may get granny to stop trying to click every link in existence and stop trusting everything she reads as gospel, but good luck with that.

All it usually takes is a healthy does of skepticism and some common sense to avoid these scammers, but here’s one I hadn’t seen until today:

First the buyer sends you a short message, “Are you negotiable?” and you respond with something along the lines of, “Yes.” This is like bass pro-tour fishing for them. Now that you’ve nibbled on the bait, it’s time sink the hook.

Hey,

Great. When would be a good time for me to come by to take a look? I want to make sure I can afford the insurance, but I can’t get this thing to go through on my dial up connection. (slowwww) Can you do me a huge favor and go to Auto Quote and see how much the average price is for our area?

Thanks!

Hmmm, suspicious?

Meanwhile the words “Auto Quote” is a link to some jibberish website such as adghfzr.info. I’m not about to click that link. In the simplest scam the scammer gets paid for people clicking on the link when it forwards you to another site, and we don’t want that.

If that wasn’t enough to raise a brow, a quick whois lookup shows the domain was registered this very same day.

Dial up… seriously?

If this is a listing for a 92 toyota corolla thats one thing. But I’d love to try listing a $90k sports car and see if I can gather the same scam-dingle berries.

Other than that it’s a dead end because the registrant is whoisguard protected, which isn’t a problem other than it just doesn’t give us much information to pursue this nefarious troll. If you’re going to scam the scammer, you’ll have to take the bait.