scam

See the article on TSN

-- MH '72 97 '77 96 '78 95 '79 96 '91 900i 16

I have a car on sale in Autotrader. Two almost identical scams occurred. First a guy said he will buy it for the full asking price. Said he'll send me a few thousand dollars more than the asking price but asked me to deposit the difference to his account first. Am I dumb or what? When I replied he is not getting a cent from me without me seeing the money first, silence ensued. The second guy, claiming to be a Reverend buying the car for his church, has an email address based in the UK, doing a similar trick. Now why would anyone buy a beat up 86 BMW in the US and ship it across the pond to drive on the wrong side of the road?

Yeah, I read that about a year ago, and that is why I knew so quickly this was a scam.

Those happen all the time, not just on saabnet.

I am surprised though that all cars HAVE to be RHD in New Zealand, what about collectible cars?

I have sold 2 different cars on SAABnet. Curiously, the one that drew the most scam activity was the 1992 9000T I listed for around $4k. I got no less than 6 scam attempts on that one, all of them as easy to spot as could be. Even if I had not read the warnings, it was blatant. Makes me wonder what sort of fools would fall for this crap...

The second car was a 2000 900SET Convertible. It had a *much* higher asking price ($15,900 as I recall) and did not draw a single nigerian email. I guess they figure the lower priced guys are somehow more apt to fall for their scam?

The best one was the eBay ad for a BMW M3 with some ridiculously low buy-it-now price. The story that guy gave me by email was hilarious. The car was in europe and had to be transported back to the US.

I'm fairly sure that he did not even own the car, but had just taken a couple of pictures of one along the side of the road.

-Fred W

I wonder why 'whazzizname the banninator' tolerates that sort of thing. You'd think he'd block them by IP so they can't use his board.

It doesn't work that way, Dave. The Classifieds are viewable to any and all, no login or account required. They just reply to the ad by regular email.

The banning takes place only on that web site's message boards, which do require a user account, hence the ability to ban.

-Fred W

I understand that, but blocking website visitors by IP address is trivially easy. Not that I'm offering to help _him_ do it, mind you. It's just an observation that he seems selective in what he does something about.

I can even serve different content to people if they're coming from one particular ISP, or one particular browser, or OS, or anything really. The user-agent string gives a LOT of useful information, and the IP address can be used to, say, give people from a certain ISP slower response (fewer available connections or throttled bandwidth), or to give them an alternate site, or to deny access entirely.

Lots of stuff to play with at the webserver layer. But, scuze me, I need to go play with _our_ webserver layer now...

Dave

NZ like Australia is a RHD country.

Agreed. I've had strange contacts from people trying to buy stuff through my Ebay listings (not Saab bits fortunately - usually computer parts).

Regards,

Craig.

Especially since he blocks plenty of other people by IP address (which in my case locks out the entire user base of APANA Sydney who also make use of the proxy server that I run for APANA and which I use myself), and most of these seem to be legitimate posters who broke the 'rules' which are there to protect the interests of the commercial advertisers.

Craig.

What rules?

They're in the Saabnet 'mission statement' I think. I've got it linked using the 'URL of misfortune' logo (!) on my personal C900 site at "

Craig.

PT Barnum " a sucker is born every minute"

That's what I said. That's why I checked to see if NZ's government requires cars to be RHD, and it does.

Yup. As someone else said, you are more likely to be contacted if the asking prices is low. And the people talk about what a good price it is, indicating they are scammers or don't know the general value of the car. They try to write with emphasis, but it's clear they are not native English speakers.

Tom