craigslist scam

[dizzyde]

I have a friend who was selling some dogs in the newspaper and the same thing happened to her. These people were from out off state and were going to send someone to pick up the dogs. She fell for it and told them to send the travelers checks, but after she got them got suspicious and went on-line to check out the travelers checks and the numbers that were on them didn't exist. Luckily she hadn't cashed them yet.

There are many variations of this type of scam, I had the same thing happen to me in regards to winning a "contest" twice in the last year. I received checks in the mail from "winning" some contest I supposedly entered, but weirdly the checks were from some random company that had nothing to do with the name of company that was notifying me.

All I had to do was cash them and send the people an administrative fee of x amount of dollars. I was immediately suspicious and got the phone number of the company issuing the checks off the internet and called them. It was a car dealership in the Midwest, and when I explained why I was calling them they immediately put me through to the CFO of the company. He put me on speaker phone and called a lawyer into the room and had me describe the letter and the check. He said mine was the second phone call that they received that week, that apparently these were checks that had disappeared several years ago, and had apparently been washed and rewritten. He gave me the # of an FBI agent that was handling the situation, and asked me to call him.

Very strange, I have no idea how they got my name, and picked me for a mark.