We had a high-ish value listing up on kijiji.ca, my husband was contacted by what appeared to be a very interested buyer. Their original message to us via email was:
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I want to ask you some questions about the item you are selling.
Why are you selling the item?
What's it present condition?
Are you the first owner?
What is the Final Price?
Am buying it for my personal use and i will be paying you through paypal as am currently out of town and i can only send money out from here through paypal i have a pickup agent that will be coming for the pickup as soon as the payment has been send for it so kindly send me your PayPal Email address and also your contact address along with your Phone Number to complete the payment now I await your fast response.
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When we replied, we sent them our paypal email address and received the following "notification" via email:
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FROM: Looked like it came from intl.paypal.com, ACTUALLY came from a domain of secureroot.com
SUBJECT: Message From PayPal***Please Follow Procedure***
This email is sent to you to get you informed that a payment has been made for(Bike)from one of our clients"Gozalez Antonio". So we request that you wire the Money in the next 24 hours and send the Money Gram Transfer Receipt to us so that we can verify that the money has been sent,as fund will be credited into your account and any effort not to do so will cause the stoppage of your money until we verified you have sent the money to the address provided. This is just to make sure that both the buyer and seller are satisfied and to protect them from been fraudulent transaction. ThisPayPal® payment has been deducted from the buyer's account and has been "APPROVED" but will not be credited to your account until the Money Gram Transfer Receipt is sent to us for Wire verification so as to secure both the buyer and the sellera. Below are the necessary information requested before your account will be credited. Send Money Gram Transfer Receipt given to you at the Money Gram office to us or email us through this mail (Spam address was listed here). our customer service care representative will attend to you. As soon as you send us the Money Gram Transfer Receipt to us for security purposes and the safety of the buyer and the seller,the money will be credited to your account.
**PLEASE NOTE** Once Money has been verified and the Money Gram Transfer Receipt send to us, You will receive a "CONFIRMATION EMAIL" from PayPal® informing you that the whole pending Payment has been credited into your account.
Note: As this transaction was done via our e-mail payments service, all inquiries should be directed to us by replying to this e-mail (Spam email address was inserted here) as it is the one being monitored for your transaction which is because the status of this transaction has not been passed on to the phone service section of our customer care.
PROTECT YOUR PASSWORD Never give your password to anyone, including PayPal employees. Protect yourself against fraudulent websites by opening a new web browser (e.g. Internet Explorer or Netscape) and typing in the PayPal URL every time you log in to your account.
Thank you for using PayPal!
Duly at your service.
The PayPal Team.
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I also received a phoney notification that money had been transfered to my PayPal account that went directly to my email's Spam folder.
This is obviously a scammer. The email domain has nothing to do with PayPal, the message itself is riddled with grammatical issues. The whole point of PayPal is secure money transfers, why in the world would they need yet another layer of security via moneygram... Please be aware and warned, do not fall prey to this.
