Monday, January 07, 2008

Nigerian 419 scam

We were looking at laptops available on Craigslist Vancouver and stumbled upon an offer that seemed like a very good deal - the computer was at least $300-400 less than most others comparable to it. We were in the market for just such a machine. Naturally, I emailed the seller.

amybenson28@yahoo.com responded to say that she had moved to London, but was still in fact selling the laptop. Actually, she had quite a lot to say about how she was selling it. She had the whole thing worked out in advance so that I could get the laptop in as little as two days, thanks to the good folks at UPS. I won't bother to quote the actual email, but needless to say it read like a standard 419 scam which meant that we would not be getting this particular laptop.

There really wasn't much I could do beyond flagging the item on craigslist (I did) and walking away from this. I wasn't in the mood to pretend to be interested in hopes of stringing along 'Amy'. But then, I suppose if someone else was interested in that, I've already provided enough information to do so...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

good, I'm always looking for a cheap laptop... you say it's only $419 dollars?

Anonymous said...

what's an s-cam?

Is that by logitec?

Derek said...

Here's an interesting turning of the tables on that kind of scam.

iTripped said...

Yeah, I really debated wether or not to do that. Ultimately, laziness prevailed