Sad to say it happened to me last week on Ducati Forum. Big thanks to El Toro and Ducbird for helping out and quickly posting up warnings all over the Forum. Here are some avoidance tips: Watch out for this type of wording in a PM "Hey mate contact David he has one in excellent condition and he's willing to sale at a fair price. PM him [email protected]" The user will be a new member with a not so clever name or any avatar like cgt878. The email dialogue with his friend will be linguistically challenged. The price may be a bit too good to be true. Yes yes.....what was I thinking? Well it's the Ducati Forum, nice people trying to help each other out....right. The PayPal address will not resemble the email address or personal details. There may be an unexpected currency conversion issue. So if my 35 quid loss staves off further losses for other members, my battered ego may recover.
All the sentiments expressed about this being a good place and trying to help out are exactly the reasons I would likely have fell for this also…and have indeed referred forum members to other posts/sites for “bargains”. Lessons everywhere - sorry it happened to you and - I know £ is all relative - but, glad it wasn’t for more.
I was so close to giving away £200! I got to the point where he shared the dodgy looking paypal account before stopping just in time. Like Paul, I thought it must be OK, everyone on here is a good bloke...... But some scamming f*cker now has my address, email and what ever else they can scrape off the web. Caveat emptor!!
Beat me to it Sorry you got scammed matey. Plenty of scum out there willing to play on good will and steal your stuff.
Sorry to hear you got caught. He tried the same with me regarding my wanted ad for a wheel. I must admit I emailed him, but the reply rung so many bells I dropped it and asked Ducbird about the forum member. In the mean time El T had already closed his account. I'm just glad my training and experience from my work environment kicked in, despite how good the deal looked.
Kudo for fronting up and warning us. The moderators on this forum are dodgy as hell so everything else should be a warning ! ;-) Mods - just kinding
There has been a lot of scamming this way on Ducati MS. They have put in place measures to try and stop them. Something like minimum post counts to advertise. Maybe having a PM entitlement for subscribers only, or PM privilege only after 30 forum posts. They often reply to wanted adverts. How about making the wanted section only visible to subscribers? Mick
They weren’t advertising. They were responding to adverts. I think the loophole has been plugged, but I’ll look into those suggestions too to see how easy or not they are to implement.
I’ve asked the question as to whether we can implement some additional checks via the forum software.
