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MG MG Y Type - A Question of Legitimacy

Well, it's been fun, but current finances force me to sell Y5095. She has been listed for sale on the BBS and I hope she goes to a good home. Now for the question. Within hours of posting the For Sale I received the following email:

Dear Sir,

I'm sales manager for (autolink) in Sweden.At
present we have a buyer interested in purchasing your car mentioned
above for the sum of $15,000(CLIENT NEGOCIATION) and we will arrange
for the pick up of the car once payment is comfirmed cleared by you.

Please Acknowledge the offer so we'll inform the buyer of your
acceptance to sell the car.

Reply ASAP with payment options, picture and other details.



Regards,
Blair, G.


I appologise if it is legitimate, but I am highly suspicious of this offer - it looks like a scam to me. Has anyone ever heard of this outfit? With perfectly good examples available on that side of the pond I can't imagine anyone wanting this particular Y that badly.

Paul Briggs
Paul Briggs

Yes, in my opinion it's another scam. The don't mention the type of car or your name anywhere. It appears to be a generic mass mailer. Of course there's nothing wrong with a reply just in case. You're already on their list!
Steve Simmons

Paul - I would say that the offer has a 99% chance of being a scam, so if you reply to him, it would behove you to be EXTREMELY sceptical of anything he tell you. My answer to that type of an offer in the past is to tell them that if they show up on my doorstep with the asking price in USD CASH ONLY, the item is theirs. I have never heard back from them. Cheers Dave (dubious) DuBois
David DuBois

For more reports of this latest scam go to
www.e83w.co.uk
then click scam alert
and read on.
M J Hardy

If you go to www.e83w site why dont you look up my 1951 Fordson in owners section.
Malcolm

I agree with Dave I am afraid.

You will get several of these types of email.

The fact that they cannot spell Negotiation is a big enough clue to me. Another giveaway is the fact that they often are all in lower case with poor on no punctuation.

I am no Master of the english language and my spelling is not hot (no fellow US readers of the website - I am not referring to the fact that I spell colour properly - LOL!!).

A final clue is often in the reply to email address. I dont want to put down any isp but Yahoo seem to play host to a great number of scamers.

If you reply, you will be, sorry, may well be added to a list of junk mail subscribers.

For me, I'd bin it!

To Paul, and any other classified entrant, I apologise for this abuse of the internet, however, I am sure you will realise that given the nature of the beast, I think you all agree the benefits outweigh the downside.

Do be careful though - not everyone is as honest as we (for the most part)all are.

Regards

Paul
Paul Barrow

Further to my comments above, I meant to include a tip to you all. Always include something in your advert that you specifically want genuinely interested people to mention when replying so that you can weed out the junk from genuine.

Something like:
"Please mention 'FROZEN PEAS' somewhere in your email if you are genuinely interested in buying my car/parts/whatever. This way I will know you are less likely to be a scammer. Failure to include this phrase will result in your email being trashed unanswered."

Most mass mailsurfing software looks for "Car", "FOR SALE" and a price then folds these into a generic mass mailer. By adding a "catcher" like I have outlined above only people who really read the email will see it and should actually do something about it. I havent tried the technique myself, but it might be an interesting thing to try!

Paul
Paul Barrow

Something very similar happened to a friend advertising a Fiat X1/9 on the web. What we did, suspecting a scam, was to express great interest: things moved on well until money was supposed to change hands. Then, predictably, nothing.

Your Internet Service Provider can help you by tracing the email - if you care that much! With the email open in Outlook, select View/Options and you will see the mail "header": paste this into a message to your ISP and see what they can do: at the very least they can block further mail.
Tim Griggs

I wasn't about to respond to this bozo without alot of glowing testimonials about his business. Too many alarm bells went off when I read his email. I've also received two more "Nigerian" emails since then, one of them about a long lost cousin of some sort.

Paul B. - excellent idea about using "code words" to show that a real person is responding. By the way, I can spell color correctly, too! Watch me! Red, blue green, purple... :)

Paul Briggs
Paul Briggs

What's a lost U between friends-we have enough Ys to compensate!

Paul
Paul Barrow

This thread was discussed between 21/08/2004 and 24/08/2004

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