Could this be a con?

Desert Orchid

Desert Orchid

Senior Jockey
Joined
Aug 2, 2005
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I recently advertised my car in Auto Trader.

I received an email from a prospective buyer with a very English name but the text read very much like a foreigner. The person is willing to pay the full asking price by banker's cheque but wants to know my full address "for shipping purposes". He says once the funds have cleared into my account he will contact his lawyer to arrange shipping etc.

Has anyone else had a reply to a car ad along these lines? I can't help being suspicious about it!
 
Call me paranoid, but I'd be wary of someone offering to buy a car they've never seen before, DO..............especially someone asking for personal details that were'nt included in your advert................and especially especially someone whose e-mail reads like one a Nigerian prince might send.
 
Grasshopper said:
especially especially someone whose e-mail reads like one a Nigerian prince might send.
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lol very true. Me and a few others had our contact email in our local paper for something we were doing and i've never stopped getting spam from these princes since. I'm not a computer man and I really don't know if this is African people spamming us or British people pretending to be African for some unknown reason. I dunno, either ways it is scary the type of people that are out there.
 
A few months ago, I advertised my wife's old Honda on Auto Trader. I got a few emails and several phone calls from as far away as Dublin. One even offered to pay £100 more than the asking price just to have me keep it for him.

(The car was put up for sale - £595ono - because it was too expensive to repair. I was honest in the advert in that I sold it 'for spares or repair'. It had 120,000 miles on the clock and was giving us a lot of hassle. Eventually the garage I use credited me with £600 in exchange for the car. The guy did a wee bit of cosmetic work and temporary mechanical patch-up work and sold it on a couple of weeks later for £1100! He said he could have done the work for us but would have had to charge us the labour, which would have been expensive. He did it 'between jobs' in the workshop.)

So it wouldn't be the first time I'd received offers from people that hadn't seen the car!

Getting emails from Nigerian princes doesn't bother me. I ignore them. They're very few and far between these days anyway.
 
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The shipping costs alone would be more than the cars worth, so one assumes its not the vehicle they're after. In any event, if they were moving overseas, then it'd be much cheaper to buy a car in that market than ours, esepcially one that doesn't work
 
There was a story in our local paper last year that was a mirror image of what you have described DO

Don't touch it with a barge pole.

What happened the chap paid the cheque in to his bank which did clear so he let the car go & two weeks later the bank contacted him to say the the cheque was fraudulant & they took the money back,
Chap ended up with no money & no car!
 
It's very much a con. Quite a few people tried it on me when I sold a car last year, I reported them all to Auto Trader.

Oh I forget, since I'm on 'ignore' he won't get to see this. Pity! :lol:
 
Seems like a phoney, DO, if the Autotrader report is anything to go by.

If you send me your bank details, I'll be happy to wire you £1000 sterling for the motor. We can arrange pick-up at a later date.

May the peace of the Lord be with you.
 
It's a con DO - one of my workmates did something similar with his car (put it in Autotrader) and was sent back a long e-mail purporting to be from a chap in Sweden (in broken English) and it sounds identical to the one that you've been sent.
 
Grasshopper said:
If you send me your bank details, I'll be happy to wire you £1000 sterling for the motor. We can arrange pick-up at a later date.

May the peace of the Lord be with you.
Click to expand...

:lol::lol:

Et cum spiritu tuo!

Thanks for the replies, guys, especially Gareth for the AutoTrader link. I'll report the emails as advised.
 
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