A couple of weeks ago I responded to an ad on craigslist San Francisco for an apartment in the Diamond Heights area. The apartment seemed under priced, but not so under priced that I was immediately wary. The apartment was in a complex, and lots of apartment complexes post ads with pictures of their model units which are nothing like the unit you actually get, so the fabulous pictures didn’t really set off too many alarm bells either.

For weeks I didn’t get a response so I figured the apartment was rented and forgot about it.

Today I get a short, not well written email from a scammer (lisamajutyynj@aol.com) claiming that the apartment owner is in London and I need to send them the money to get the keys. I especially liked the fact that they never mentioned how much money they wanted; clearly they are not very good at being con men. Sigh. I’ve reported this to craigslist and told the scammer to get lost.

A search for the email address lead to a blog post:
http://www.rantlust.com/skat/2007/09/19/internet-fraud/

So clearly this is a whole lucrative branch of craiglist fraud that is going on. The saddest part is that they seem to be stealing the identities of the suckers they have scammed and selling that info which new scammers then use to scam new people. Ah, the circle of life.

Be safe out there and hold onto your money.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 12th, 2009 at 2:14 pm and is filed under misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.