That is a really good boat.
Can you share that message from daniellehatfield888? Seeing the evidence makes it easier to silence scammers.
Conversation with a scammer. Reads bottom to top😊:
4. Danielle gives it one more try.
Due to the nature of my job in the military I only have access to email for now. I need your name and address so that the eCheck can be emailed to you. I will also wait till you cash the check at your bank for clearance before my personal shipper will come for the pick up.
- My response to #1
Danielle, I’m unfamiliar with “echeck” procedure and will need to talk with the manager at my bank in New Jersey to get her OK. This may take a bit of time.
Jake
- Danielle’s response to my description of Aironaut/condition, etc
Thanks for the update am ok with the price and condition currently out of town due to the nature of my job military now at Fort Carson Army Base Colorado my mode of payment will be an eCheck and only have access to email for now.I need your name and address so that the check can be send to you also my shipper will come for pick up after check clears at your bank.Let me know how you will like to proceed with this and get the payment.Danielle
Danielle Hatfield’s initial response to ad for Aironaut
- Hello, I am interested in buying it. Let me know if it’s available. Danielle
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How about replying? “Danielle, what a stroke of good luck! My brother is in Army CID and will be at Ft. Carson shortly for his job. He said he’d bring the boat and you can pay him cash.”
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Thanks. Clearly a scammer.
I like the lack of all specifics in the scammer’s emails. It could be used verbatim for any item anyone was selling. No mention of a boat or anything. Guess it saves time, when you’re scamming hundreds of people at a time. I assume it’s some sort of a bot, but if so it seems like it would extract key words from the ads it’s targeting. Also needs to learn about punctuation 
I’ve been on other forums where you had to have a minimum post count of 10-20 on different threads before you could access classifieds, post links, reviews and other spam, scam or shill targets.
I imagine it could have value that is, until the AI bot thing takes over. At some point it may be just AI bots talking to each other on forums.
The “Danielle” correspondence looks completely familiar including the Fort Carson info. That one has been going on for years. I like RC51’s response idea !
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I think the classified section here is overall less good than local CL or FBMP simply because it’s not specifically geared toward local transactions. Anyway I’m terms of scams the answer is easy: always do cash pickup in person.
Agree. I’ll place an ad on CL when I get back home in New Jersey in mid April. More likely to sell it to someone living in NYC who wants something to paddle but can’t store a hardshell.
I’ve been buying and selling on line for 25 years on multiple platforms and have noted a clear pattern of clues for that a prospective “buyer” is running a scam (and many of these clues also apply to romance scammers – I get several Facebook requests a month from fake accounts claiming to be men wanting to “friend” me to start some long distance "relationship.)
The name pattern is so common as to be a joke by now. The scammer uses a combination of fairly common American first and last names followed by a 3 or 4 digit number. I’ll bet that the scam shops in Nigeria have a primitive name generation algorithm that generates these. More often than not, the names are female rather than male, probably because the scammers have learned from experience that both genders in their targets are less skeptical of a female. So a typical scammer will be “ashleymorgan1234” or “melissajackson5678”.
The claim to be in the military or working for a contractor on overseas assignment is a major “tell”. If you respond to them this claim will metasticize into excuses for why you can’t call them on the phone or why they can’t share an address or make simple arrangements to accept pay and expedite delivery.
Saying an “agent” or “friend” will pick up the item is another obvious tell that this is a scam. Also attempting to pay by crypto or cashiers check (these will always be counterfeit and appearing to be issued on overseas banks.) If a seller makes the mistake of accepting a sketchy check payment it will usually be for a much higher amount than the agreed upon price and the scammer will claim that was a “mistake” and request that the seller refund the difference in cash to their “agent”. This is how they skim cash from fake sales. By the time the buyer learns that the “check” they deposited is fake or NSF, that cash “refund” is gone.
I know of some pro scam baiters who will play along with the attempted perpetrators and allow them to mail the phony “cashier checks” which they then just hang on the wall as trophies and claim to have never received. One even persuaded the scammer to send his “agent” to collect cash and gave him a pickup address that was the regional office of the FBI.
I found with selling large ticket items (like boats) that when I am uncertain as to the validity of the prospective buyer, throwing out a nonsense statement about some detail of the item will confirm whether this person is a serious prospect. In the past the high-volume pro scammers would respond to a “for sale” ad by saying “I want to buy your item” . The lack of specificity is a clear tell that this is a boiler plate scam. Real buyers will most often reach out with “I want to buy your yellow Necky Looksha kayak”. But they scams have gotten more clever with their generator algorithms and have learned to copy/paste the actual item descriptions into their standard initial contact scripts.
But you can still detect a scam by inventing nonsense. Like tell them this model you are selling has the hydraulic propulsion well and the front brake ice point. If they say “whatever” rather than “WTF?” you are probably dealing with a scammer who has no clue what you are selling and only wants to leverage cash out of you.
But even with all the scammers I’ve had to dismiss, selling through boards like this and even CL and FB Marketplace has worked well for me and never resulted in a loss. I have even acted as a broker (enabler?) several times helping connect boat sellers and buyers by transporting them or acting as an intermediary since I am retired and often travel in vehicles with room to carry an extra boat.
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Today must be my lucky day. I just checked my spam filter and imagine my surprise to find out that elicesylvana1191 wants to be my friend! I’ll bet she’d buy a boat too.
Still, I agree with willowleaf. Overall, the classifieds have worked well for me. Although the fraudsters are annoyance for sure, it doesn’t take a lot of common sense to ruin their game. I can give them the respect they deserve and move on. Nothing gained by getting my knickers in a knot about it.
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Yup, just posted my kayak in classified last night and this morning I had a message from daniellehatfield888 trying the same scam.
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Is there anyone who’s posted in the classified that hasn’t been contacted by this scammer?
I haven’t gotten that one yet but the only response I’ve had so far to a paddle for sale that I just posted was from “michaelwall99” who clearly is also a scammer. I just ignored it.
Same here. Minutes after posting Hatfield contacted me with all of the above responses .
Nice, detailed description of scam tactics from willowleaf!
Fort Carson base sure has a lot of “kayakers”. I got one of those scammers, too, but in my case I thought it might be legit at first, because that base is in the same state I live in.
They never did specify what the “item for sale” was, though. A dead giveaway flagging a scammer.
We spent 2.5 years on Ft. Carson. Not much navigable water
there but I hadn’t discovered paddling yet.
I actually did once sell an item to someone serving overseas in the military (in Eastern Europe). I had a rare paddle he was looking for – in this case I saw his “item wanted” in another online forum. So though it was not a case of a scammer approaching me, I mention this because it was super easy to arrange shipment because the US military goes out of its way to make sure that their troops and employees on remote deployment can have things shipped to them. That is also true of people working as contract administrators working out of town or overseas – I worked in the infrastructure construction and engineering field for over 35 years so I know how field personnel have company provided options to facilitate having items shipped to them.
So that is another clue that someone who claims to be either in the military or an overseas contractor is full of crap when they claim complex difficulties in enabling delivery or payment.
I once caused a persistent romance scammer who contacted me on Facebook to magically vanish when I clicked on his faked “profile” and saw he was claiming to be overseas on a project where the international engineering company I was working for at the time was the lead contractor. I admit I “accepted” his friend request just to bait him. After exchanging a few pleasantries (that further confirmed he was scammer) I asked him what kind of work he did on that project. When he gave me a lame excuse that it was a secret government project and he was not allowed to discuss it I told it that it was OK since by fortunate coincidence I worked for the company and had high level security ranking since I was responsible for reviewing the subcontractor qualifications and billings. In fact, said I, if he shared his work email with me we could communicate via the corporate dashboard. Also mentioned (after a quick check of our project database) that he must know so-and-so who was the lead coordinator on the job. The scammer immediately ghosted me and his profile vanished (but not before I had reported it as fake to the FB admins.)
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