simple security

Yesterday evening, I posted an ad on Craiglist to sell my 15 inch LCD monitor. This morning I received an interesting response to my ad.

Something about the response didnt seem right. Remember, if it is too good to be true, there is a rat hiding somewhere. Firstly, this guy promises to buy my monitor right-away, without any questions. Secondly, the whole western union thing got my thinking. btw, who buys stuff for friends who are out of town, anyway?

Lets say, I respond to his email and send him my fullname, address and telephone number (obviously when I respond via email, he gets to know my email address). Then, he would send me a fake western union email stating the money has been deposited into my account (or something like that). Trusting the fake email, I would have let the FedEx guy come and pickup my monitor. Not only would the monitor be gone forever, my email address might also be sold off to a spammer.

Time for some detective work. I noticed that the email was sent out via yahoo. Yahoo has a neato thing called yahoo profiles, which also tells you when the email address was created. A quick check on the profile page, tells me that the email was created just a few days ago, maybe with the only intent of scamming.

So, whenever you receive a generic enough response to your craigslist ad, please dont even bother to reply. Usually when someone responds to your ad, they would ask you a question or two, or they would want to setup a time to meet or even leave their a phone number for you to call back. Dont give out your fullname, address or phone number in the first email exchange with a potential buyer, unless you are 100% sure that the other guy is geniunely interested in purchasing your stuff.