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A friend of mine responded to an ad on Craiglist for employment and said as soon as she replied, she received thousands of the same email from the ad. She spent a good part of her day yesterday fixing her filters and stuff and said that even as she was trying to delete stuff, it was still coming in by the hundreds. Scary stuff.
Scams happen all the time on Craigslist. Do not allow someone to come to your home to buy something, and do not go to their home. Meet them in a very public place to make the transaction. Do not accept personal checks. Do not deal with anyone outside of the US. Do not deal with Western Union. Be careful if being rushed. Don't ever mail merchandise until you have received proper payment. If it is a cashiers check or money order, you can go to your bank and they will make sure it is not fake. If you get payment through PayPal and mail the item, get full insurance coverage on it and mail it certified mail where they have to sign for it and you can track it, like through UPS. It is too easy for these people to say they never got it, file a claim with PayPal and if you cannot prove you mailed it and they got it, you will lose.
"If it is a cashiers check or money order, you can go to your bank and they will make sure it is not fake."
This is a common misconception. The bank cannot tell the complete legitimacy until it is fully processed, which can take days or weeks. U.S. postal money orders don't seem to have the issues that cashiers checks do. There is no need to accept cashiers checks. If you are dealing local, do the transaction in the parking lot of the buyer's bank and have them withdraw the cash for you.
"If it is a cashiers check or money order, you can go to your bank and they will make sure it is not fake."
This is a common misconception. The bank cannot tell the complete legitimacy until it is fully processed, which can take days or weeks. U.S. postal money orders don't seem to have the issues that cashiers checks do. There is no need to accept cashiers checks. If you are dealing local, do the transaction in the parking lot of the buyer's bank and have them withdraw the cash for you.
Yes and no. If you have a cashier's check, the bank it is drawn on should definitely be able to if it is legitimate. (Also, if the bank the funds are drawn on is not bank issuing the check, it is not a true cashier's check. It is technically a money order. And no, you can probably not check on that.) The reason there is so much cashier's check fraud is that cashier's checks were supposed to be considered "guaranteed funds" because they are drawn off a bank's account, not a personal account. It used to be banks were not allowed to hold cashier's checks, so they were basically considered a transaction equal to a cash transaction. This opened the door up to a lot of fraud, so now cashier's checks are seen (rightly) with a lot of suspicion.
I was a bank teller when I was in college, and I actually had someone come in once with a check sent to them for a car they were selling on eBay. It was that whole "I will send you a cashier's check for more than you are selling your item for, and you can your own cashier's check back to me for the difference" scam. She had shown it to her bank, and they had told her to come to us. Were it a valid check, I would have been able to bring the check up by number in my system and verify the amount, and, if I needed to, contact the branch that issued it. But in this case, I didn't have to even do that because the account number on the check had the wrong amount of numbers.
We deal with Craigslist quite a lot. We have even both bought and sold cars on it. But I would definitely agree with everyone else-- only deal locally and only deal in cash.
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