Hi,
This post is directed towards the people that run this site, especially the classifieds section. Recently i tried to sell an f150 part(tracloc and 4.10 gears), and i got a reply via email from someone who was interested in these parts. Basically this person wanted to send my about 6 times the amount i wanted for the parts saying that the leftover money should be sent to his "shipping company." Sounds fishy already, furthermore this person has not given me any personal information, i don't even know his real name! I have checked his ip address and apparently it says the email is coming from a computer in Iran! This person sent the cashier's check even though i said not to, and the mailman would not even leave it in my mail because it has stamps from nigeria. After this i am about 99.99 sure that this person is a scammer, so i let him know that i will alert the authorities and so on, and he replies with a threat about how he will cause trouble to my family and I, which is a bit scary since i gave him my address(i gave him my address before i was certain that he was a scammer). Like i said, i am 99.99% sure he is trying to scam me. So now i will have the check inspected at my local bank to see if it really real, if it is real, oh well, but if not i am going to either tear it up or report it to authorities. The thing that bothered me further is that i have gotten 3 identical emails from 2 different people, saying how they will pay with cashier's check and that they will send a personal shipper.

For the people who run this site- Could you please do something about thisi know that you cannot monitor everyone that becomes a member on this site. However, i have been scammed before for $300, and it does not feel good at all. So instead of watching who registers, maybe could you send out a notice to all the members about this scamming, or maybe send out a special email to those people who are trying to sell things, warning them of this type of scam. Maybe everyone knows about this, but it never hurts.

 

fasteddie91,

There are dozens of threads on these forums regarding this exact scam. It's been around for a few years now. Like you said, there is nothing we can do to control who responds to your classified ads (you don't want us to force people to register in order to reply to classifieds or it will reduce the number of potential buyers by 90% or more), but we do keep all of the threads on the subject on the forums and try to move them to the appropriate, "Questions about the Site" forum.

We feel it is also the responsibility of our users to know the scams that are out there, as they are not F150 specific and the primary content of this site is, after all, trucks and not Internet etiquette. You may also want to contact your ISP about this, as I feel education on matters like this are really their primary responsibility.

In the coming days, we plan to add a "disclaimer" of sorts to the area where you add a classified to make people aware of these scams. Server issues have taken a front seat to anything else right now. BTW, this disclaimer already exists (and has for some time) on the classified reply page.

Steve