Well tonight I was subject to quite a wonderful scam. Suffice to say, I lost nothing. Here goes my story:
I created an ebay auction.http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6792095239. Selling my laptop, so I could get something else for college. After about an hour of this being up, I recieved an email from a guy saying he wanted to buy it.
This is a copy of the email he sent:
So I figured it was legit enough, and I sent him my address. I soon recieved an email that seemed like it was from paypal. It listed the amount he was paying for.
Here's a copy of part of the email:
At the time, I was kind of confused by the way it looked, but I let it slide. I then sent him an email saying it didn't contain his shipping address, which is an option you can chose to not send someone on paypal.
He sent me back an email saying:
So I sent him an email back saying that I suppose he has to send paypal the tracking number, because I found no way to do it.
He responded with:
That's when I started to realize what was happening. So I went back and looked over his email. I noticed that it was sent from paypalconfirmations@pay-palpayment.com. I went to check out www.pay-palpayment.com and found it wasn't a real site. That's when I got a little flustered. I called up paypal and only got the automated computer, but it told me what I needed to know. It said that the emails from paypal should look a certain way.
This email I got from a previous paypal payment follows their guidlines:
As you can see, there are quite a few differences between the two emails. I went and checked ebay, the member just joined the same day I got his email. I checked yahoo, where he is a new member.
I knew what was going on and I sent him an email saying:
I called up the FBI, but their lines were busy. So I sent them a very descriptive email saying the exact same thing here.
I'm happy I avoided a scam, and there's still time to sell my laptop. Maybe one of you want to buy it?