It goes like this.... You advertise your bike for sale on Gumtree giving your phone number and shortly afterwards you get a text asking if the bike is still for sale and could you reply by e-mail. You answer by e-mail and get one back asking a few questions about the bike, all of which are mentioned in the advert. You answer the questions and then get another e-mail saying that they are happy with the condition and price and they will pay by PayPal if you send them your PayPal e-mail address or send them a PayPal invoice. They also want your address so that they can let their shipping agent know where to collect it from. I know it must be a scam as no-one buys a nearly new bike unseen and doesn't at least try to get the price reduced a bit but how does it go from this point on? Are they just after your PayPal details or do they send a van round to nick your bike? I can't work it out and it's starting to annoy me. I've had two people try pretty much the same thing within the space of a week.
Had a Nigerian try to buy something I was selling on there. He wanted my bank details so he could put the money in, then will come round to pick item up. I said just bring cash with you when you collect. He never showed up.
I don't get it. If they wanted to know where you live to nick it, why not just ring. "Hi, I'm interested in your bike, where do you live"? Must be a paypal scam, once they have your details it's probably relatively easy to crack a password these days, cunning swine that they are. Don't know really???
If it's a Gmail or Yahoo address or an email address that doesn't fit this country you can bet it's a scam. I get a lot of scams and all sorts of rubbish in my email accounts and mostly they are from Nigeria (no1) Ghana, Asian countries like Singapore or finally Eastern Europe. You can trace some IP's using this. Complete email header analysis. Analyse, track ip here Clearly if they are outside the UK it's a scam and just don't answer them. Some scams are not always as well thought out as people might think, language can sometimes be the problem for scammers as they cannot write enough English to respond well enough. I had one scammer calling people Clints instead of clients. The dodgiest are the Asian scammers from Singapore, China etc.
In summary it'll either be a refund fraud through PayPal, or you'll get a PayPal-looking email which links to what looks like PayPal but isn't. You enter your PayPal details to log in and it sends them to the scammers and tells you there was a problem logging in. So now the scammer knows your PayPal details, changes your email and password and strips your account / bank account / visa card by making money transfers.
There was a chap on here who had a bike for sale, i emailed him and never got a reply. Oh well, I guess Ill have to go buy somewhere else.
Had exactly the same myself last year. I think we should start a list of scammers email addresses and start passing them back and forward to each other when they ask for details. Should slow them down a bit. I said give my your address and I'll ride it over to you as I need a holiday and would like 1 last ride anyway. No reply.
