Another scam bogus buyer?

[EffTee]

Here is the email I received from [e-mail] Lisa Carol Farmer

I replied in the nicest possible terms "go away"

Thanks for the feedback, I'm really keen to buy it off you. please, give me a first buying priority and I will be paying the asking price so consider it sold, I will like you to be honest with me because I will not be available to come for inspects due to nature of my work, Honestly, I am purchasing it for my step-son who has just graduated on his class in University of Nottingham, He studied Science and Engineering, "I am so proud of him . I want it as a surprise package to appreciate him for his achievement which I don't want him to know about until it is picked up and to be delivered before my arrival.

I am working with Cygnus Gas Field and we are presently offshore at North Sea, United Kingdom in the Cygnus project. We do not have access to phones at the moment, it's days off and days on, which is why I contacted you with INTERNET messaging facility. Where is it located at the moment? Does it have any history I should be aware of? How many miles on it? Are you the original owner and why are you selling? Do you have the logbook in hand?, and MOT/TAX if you don't mind my asking. I don't mind adding an extra £200.00 for you just to take down the posting, I am already in talks with the courier that will handle the pick-up and delivery after payment. As regards the payment, I will be paying through PayPal account, using PayPal instant wire transfer service, I will need your PayPal email account details. If you do not have it, you can set up a PayPal account properly at www.paypal.co.uk and I will make the payment through PayPal, this way, all I will need is your PayPal email address.. I will be needing the details below..

1) Your PayPal Email Address
2) Your Picked Up Location Address

Hope to hear from you soon.

Many thanks

[Cascade360]

Yes very obvious and common scam, ignore.

[Zeb74]

This is incredible the number of people working on off-shore facilities :-). I have been in touched with many of them when I was trying to buy or sell cars.

[Uncle Winnet]

just got the same email

[Mutley00]

Zeb74 said:

This is incredible the number of people working on off-shore facilities :-).

Yeah - funny that all our off-shore facilities, regardless of the owner, have really poor comms facilities.

Job opportunity for someone here!

[N7GTX]

Remember its a Nigerian oil field......

[MikeE]

Just for the uninitiated, how would this scam work? And no I'm not going to use it myself just wonder how they end up getting cash from you, when it's them paying?

[frontfloater]

If you want to be pro-active and hinder the scammers, rather than just ignoring them and deleting the message, there are two simple ways :

1. After opening the e-mail, click on the "view source" tab to reveal the full message headers. This will be a long string of characters which includes the sending ISP - usually shown as "Received from" followed by a company name and a 12-digit number in brackets. For example :
Received: from xtrwnvfp.outbound-mail.sendgrid.net [167.89.40.243].

Forward the whole message including all the header details to the abuse-reporting address for that company, asking them to block the sender. Here, [e-mail] .

2. The headers will also contain a line beginning "Reply-to". This shows the actual e-mail address which the scammer is using. It will often be different from the displayed From / Sender address, which can be disguised as anything, and is often an innocent 3rd party account which the scammer has hacked into. For example :

From: "GOV.UK" [e-mail]
Reply-to : [e-mail]

Again, report that reply-to address to the e-mail provider company. Typical abuse reporting addresses are [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail] , etc.

[Zeb74]

MikeE said:

Just for the uninitiated, how would this scam work? And no I'm not going to use it myself just wonder how they end up getting cash from you, when it's them paying?

When you are a seller, they usually doesn't discuss the price and are even keen to pay more. I don't know all the trick, but some of them are that they wire you the amount + x, and ask you to pay the x amount with western union to the company which will transport the car. Then, they cancel the wire.

When I was buyer, I was also in touch with seller working on off-shore facilities, they were selling nice cars a bit under valuated (but not too much in order to be less suspicious). Then, they offered me a dream system, managed by DHL (they said), you pay the car to this third-party. Then they transport the car to your location, you inspect it, if you want to keep it, the third party pays the seller, else you are reimbursed. The DHL site was a very well done fake site, using all the logos, the color code... but the URL was clearly not from DHL. And of course, such a nice system doesn't exist. But if you manage to fool few percent of buyer, this is really a bargain.

[TwinKam]

MikeE said:

Just for the uninitiated, how would this scam work? And no I'm not going to use it myself just wonder how they end up getting cash from you, when it's them paying?

Typically (with smaller value items), they pay, you send goods, they say not received or not as described, PayPal reimburses them. Or they 'suck back' the transfer.

[Belle427]

I can usually tell by just reading the first few lines on all the ones I've seen.
Utter scumbags.

[yogi bear]

Had the same email today. Initially had a text message from PistonHeads saying [e-mail] has emailed them inquiring about my car for sale. I sent a message to that email and then received the same email as above. Very obvious scam but happy this thread is here to confirm.

[Oatesy]

I bought a car while offshore, the owner thought I was a scammer, had to take a photo of myself with the advert and the platform in the background to prove I was genuine.

[UKAuto]

Oatesy said:

I bought a car while offshore, the owner thought I was a scammer, had to take a photo of myself with the advert and the platform in the background to prove I was genuine.

...and just to make things worse, aren't you that Nigerian prince we have all heard about?

[Oatesy]

UKAuto said:

...and just to make things worse, aren't you that Nigerian prince we have all heard about?

I have worked in Nigeria but unfortunately I didn't become a prince

[Jon39]

Speaking of scams, can anyone advise me how to check whether this is genuine, or a scammers copy website.
It looks such a tempting offer, but perhaps that means it is too good to be true.
Asking me to send £5,000 to a firm, which I thought went bust years ago, made me wonder what might be going on.

[RayTVR]

Seems like Lisa is a very generous lady as she also wants to buy my TVR for her step-daughter…..

[frontfloater]

If the scammer is still using Gmail accounts to send these messages, I recommend reporting to Googlemail as advised previously. There is a fairly simple abuse report form here :

https://support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse?vid=...

Otherwise he/she will just keep on trying.