Last night I listed my camera gear on craigslist, and throughout the night I received about ten inquiries. Why systematically clearing out my inbox from oldest messages to newest, responding to each one I started to look more closely and notice that the name of the sender was not the same as the name of the email address, and that in NONE of these inquiries did the "potential seller" mention the camera. Most of their emails contained typo's typical of 419 / phishing scams. After a bit of research I found postings on forums where several CL users were complaining about lots of "is it still available" requests but no follow up. I hadn't found anywhere that seemed like people have put this togethet yet, but I'm sure it's just a way to harvest email addresses for spamming.
For example:
Hello dear,just to let you know that am very much interested in your item,that is why i want to confirm if the camera is still available for sell.pls get back to me asap.
Regards Andrew.
(This was the most obvious that sparked my suspicions, I'm sure the other are fake as well.)
As I'm writing this blog I recieved:
hello,
i want to buy the item so,let me know it's condition.
get back to me asap.
Too bad the description is about 4 lines in length and I mention twice that the gear is in excellent condition and has only been used three times.
Hopefully the word will get out and people will be more cautious when replying to craigslist.org inquiries that are simply asking "Is the item still available".
That's it for now, stay safe :)
-Ryan
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