How to avoid falling for scammers – Typical buyer scam

I'm simply surprised by how many people *don't* realize these are scams!
Thanks for helping get the word out.

I have a craft-ish side business, and like AbsoluteApril have been aware of the money order scams for years - I was surprised how many people on BOI seemed unfamiliar with what to me was an old ploy.

I played with a scammer along these lines back in 2011, blog post with e-mail highlights here:
http://otternecessities.blogspot.com...-back.html?m=1


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Originally Posted by cchardwick

Oh Man, I didn't even thing about scammers, I'm still growing my snakes to breed and don't have any babies yet so I'm sure that's part of the process as a breeder. I'm actually 100% confident using PayPal. I actually fell for the Nigeria scam when I tried to buy a tarantula from Nigeria, they scammed me for a couple hundred bucks. But I paid with PayPal and when I told PayPal about it they immediately refunded me the money, no questions asked! Now that's service!

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Again Paypal is not 100% either over the years people have been scammed as well with very little recourse since Paypal does not protect animal transaction to start with.

The typical scam is to buy the animal, and then contest the charge as fraudulent (person other then them using the account etc), that's why shipping to the person the account belongs too and an address that is verified is very important. Those scams are not as predominant because people can be traced back but they do exist and can create some serious headache for the seller.

Like everything else research the buyer google their name, search on the BOI because usually dishonest people have an history just like bad sellers do.

New name new email address still the same scam, short memory I guess since they tried with me just a month and a half ago. :rolleyes:

http://i954.photobucket.com/albums/a.../Scammer14.jpg

That's because it's not usually one guy, but a team of several people working to hit as many targets as possible.

I would think this also applies to the consumer as well , like the old saying goes if a deal is too good to be true it probably is so many people selling snakes how do you know they didn't steal the picture from some where else and paste it with basic knowledge hope no one here gets treated so poorly, Thank you so much for sharing

Deborah, great write-up. Thanks for documenting how this goes down.

In the future I plan to put together a "how to sell" resources similar to the "how to buy" page, and will definitely include warnings for this kind of thing and link to your example.

In time I would like to build some more automated solutions in place for detecting and stopping this kind of thing.