Hi there! I understand that there may be a few other posts on here regarding the same sort of story! HOWEVER, I would like to put another one on here as I was having trouble finding and solving my problem to begin with. I received a text not 5 hours after I had advertised my van on Gumtree, from "michael" saying "I'm interested in ur Vehicle.What's ur last asking price & its present condition?Kindly email&send the photos" was told to send them to ingoditrust706@************* Seeing this, I thought.. Great, a quick sale! So I did what anyone would do, sent what he asked for. I sent him the pictures of my van and my last asking price and explained it's condition. The person then replied: Thanks for getting back to me and i appreciate your prompt reply..I am presently out of town now.. I am buying this for my son as a surprise gift. However,does it have any history I should be aware of? and why are you selling if you don't mind my asking and I will really appreciate if you can email more info and if possible more photos. I can only pay through paypal at the moment as i don't have access to my bank account online(i dont have internet banking with it), but i have it attached to my paypal account, and this is why i insisted on using paypal to pay,all i will need is your paypal email address to make the payment, and if you dont have a paypal account yet, you can set one it cant take you less than 3mins to do that, i will be expecting your paypal email so l can pay and your phone number. I have a pick up agent that will come for the pick up after payment has been sorted, l will be waiting for your reply asap. Here is my phone number:+447031979207 So after this e-mail I responded with my best knowledge all the information on my van that I could, to which I had this reply: Ok great..I have read about it on the listing already before making inquiry and am satisfied with the condition so that's not a problem.. I can only pay in directly to your PayPal due to my present location and the payment will be fully made and cleared in your account before my agent to come there for the pickup.. You can send me a payment invoice to this email(ingoditrust706@************ and get back to me with your registered email with PayPal so i can pay in today. This is when I had a slight suspision but was blinded by the idea of quick easy money so I could get my new car. However, I did not tell him my registered email address, I only sent the invoice through PayPal. I then sent a seperate email asking if he had received the invoice. His reply: I got the invoice... I need to get in touch with my pick up agent right now and I will get back to you later today for sure as soon as am done with the payment but until then,kindly remove the item from listing to assure me. Payment will be done now but i need your home address for my agent to be able to locate you when its time for the pick up. Being the not so trusting and wary person I am, I gave him a different address. Not my actual home address but I did remove the listing as asked... After a couple of hours eagerly waiting for the money to appear in my PayPal account, I got another email... Saying: I was just about to pay when i had this problem with the pick up, my pick up agent says i will need to pay for the pick up before they can schedule a pick up time, they charged me £300 for pick up and delivery, and payments or pick up made through them is made to their corporate international headquarters which is in the states and the payments is made through western union money transfer, i will add the £300 to the money i will send through paypal as soon as i have made the payments, i will email you and let you know and please i will need you to help me send the money to my pick up agent HQ in the states through western union money transfer, this can be done from any post office ,there is always western union money transfer section in most post offices...,i would have done it myself but we cant bring some of our personal effects along, i am a little incapacitated.....I will appreciate your help here. After reading this, I sent a copy to my friend who agreed with me that this was a scam. So after swiftly googling and having a search about for similar stories, I found an exact duplicate of one of his messages on a forum. Following this I emailed him one more time out of frustration, simply saying that I know that he is a scammer and thanked him for kindly wasting my time. I have included every detail of his messages and in this post. I very much hope that this helps even just one person. I understand people have already fallen for this scam, I am lucky not to be one of them people. Any questions please don't hesitate to ask, I will try my best to answer any of them. Good luck fellow buyers and sellers and if anyone has any similar stories or even ones in direct relation to this one, then add your story! PLEASE NOTE THAT I COULD NOT PUT THE COMPLETE EMAIL ADDRESS WHICH I WAS IN CONTACT WITH AS IT'S AGAINST THE RULES! 🙂
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