In the past I have written about EBay scams and have saved hundreds of people a ton of money on how to identify potential scams. The general rule of thumb here is to watch out for what I call “Red Flags” that have in the past caught even the best scam artists.
Here is a brief overview of those “Red Flags” that should throw up a STOP sign or at-least APPROACH WITH CAUTION for you:
If the person states that they are in Africa or on another continent - Don’t take this wrong but many times when dealing with someone on a large transaction the inability to meet face to face or have a third party that can represent both parties where the laws are the same is often necessary and critical to you not being scammed.
If the end result is stating that after you have sent in your money then you will get what it is you are buying, renting ect. This is often the case when we buy online but hopefully you are buying from a knownl location that you can meet with or follow the same laws that you do.
A transaction that requires you to send money via wire transfer aka western union. Western Union states that you should only send money to people that you know - family etc or those that can personally trust.
Email clues:
- If the person is using a free account with the name of joe-bob@email.com but during your communications you find that the name they use is Jimmy Carter. This just doesn’t makes much sense as most people don’t set up accounts like this because an email is an identifiable item and most people realize this.
- If the person is stating that they represent a company but they use a free Email account - this is NOT the standard.
- Many spelling, grammatical errors in the e-mails - sounds like someone who is really trying to communicate with you but just cannot. Don’t get me wrong I have friends who are terrible when it comes to Emails but if I didn’t know them I obviously wouldn’t do business with them without a face to face either.
Website clues:
- After learning the website of their business, do a search via Google. Try and locate their business website. If your having trouble ask them what their business website is and if it is a large company you should be able to find a phone number and give them a call - see if that person works there.
- If they state they work for a company but they don’t have a web presence at all. This is especially true for medium to large sized companies however in todays’ environment even the smallest of businesses have a web presence - shoot even 16 year olds have myspace pages.
Although their are many other “Red Flags” out there the biggest one is
IF IT SOUNDS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE - IT PROBABLY IS!
This is the basic ground work and as I find some real world examples I will do my best to post them in this Category.
If this helped you feel free to comment and add your two cents or other RED FLAGS that you know of!
Jason
