Hoodwinked

Ever been hood-winked before? There probably isn’t a worse feeling in the world. I consider myself a pretty hard person to pull a fast one on…although I might occasionally behave in a way that might suggest I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed. Still, I like to think that there are a whole lot of people out there who are a heck of a lot more gullible than me, but I think I may have been “had” this time. Krissy has been trying to sell an old phone of hers on Craigslist for awhile now. She hadn’t had much success, especially in trying to sell locally, and as a result it got to the point where the initial ad expired. So, on the second ad we made we decided to consider non-local offers as well. This time around, one person in particular seemed especially interested in the phone; however, he was listed as being from Nigeria. A couple of red flags went off right away. First, this guy was really persistent, and he was offering about 50% more than our asking price for the phone. Why would you want a used phone that much, and why would you be willing to pay as much for one as a new phone? The second thing is that even if this guy had good intentions, Krissy and I haven’t had much luck in eBay/Craigslist transactions when it involves mailing things. We have done well when it ends up being someone local and we can make the exchange face-to-face, but we had gone 0 for 2 when the transaction involved mailing stuff across the country (and this was halfway across the world). The last thing was this: this guy was from, of all places, Nigeria? Isn’t that where all those so-called African princes are from who try to solicit money through spam email? That should have made us call it a day right there.

Despite the red flags, we decided to sell the phone to the guy anyway. (This part I blame more on Krissy than myself.) After agreeing, we got an email that just didn’t add up for some reason. It was requesting the tracking number, and it was giving a shipping address to send it to. The email “appeared” to be coming from PayPal, but the name on the shipping address didn’t match up with the name of the guy we thought we were selling to. I decided we should try to call the whole thing off right then and there, and I responded to the email requesting to call off the transaction and cancel the payment. I got a someone terse email back the next morning saying that the transaction could no longer be cancelled as the charges had been credited to the buyer’s account, and that if we didn’t ship the phone “legal action” could be taken. What really drove this point home for me is that I had also created a PayPal helpdesk ticket requesting for the transaction to be cancelled, and they responded that if the transaction was already pending that it could be refunded after the fact but not cancelled at this point…this is where the scammer lucked-out because at that point I wasn’t sure if the emails I was receiving were really from PayPal or not, but I knew that the PayPal helpdesk response was “real.” (The problem was that I don’t think the official helpdesk person actually looked up my individual case, and instead they were just speaking in general terms about the cancellation policy. If they had looked it up, they would have seen that the buyer didn’t even have a real PayPal account, and that there wasn’t even a pending transaction at that time because no one had attempted to pay me. More on this in a minute…)

While I blamed the events of the last paragraph on Krissy, this paragraph is all on me. Not wanting to get sued, kicked off PayPal, or face other “legal action,” I pretty much panicked. I used my entire lunch break one day to run home, grab the phone, and take it to the post office to ship off to Nigeria. The shipping process was a nightmare in itself: $40 and about an hour’s worth of hassle…if you’ve never shipped anything internationally before, there is a crapload of paperwork and stuff you have to fill out. Anyway, at that point I figured here goes nothing, and I had pretty much bought into the fact that this was a legit transaction. I was mostly concerned with the phone just getting there safe and sound, as the lady at the post office said that about half the time these international shippings get sent back because something wasn’t filled out right or one of any number of other things that could have gone wrong went wrong. As requested, I sent the tracking number to the email address that had emailed me before, but each day they would request something else. After I sent the tracking number, they basically responded that that wasn’t good enough, and they wanted a scanned copy of the post office receipt. Once that was done, the money would be credited into my PayPal account. Looking back at it now, I suppose they were just fishing for my credit card number. The request made me suspicious again at the time, but my credit card info wasn’t on the receipt, so I obliged to their request.

This morning I checked my PayPal account, and still there was nothing…no new money, not even a pending transaction. Later in the morning I got another email from “PayPal” saying basically this: through no fault of the buyer, PayPal actually mistakenly charged the buyer twice for the transaction, thus putting double the amount I was supposed to get into my account. I couldn’t see any of that money in my account yet, but rest assured that the buyer had already been charged, and this transaction could only be reversed by me if I refunded half of that money into the buyer’s account. I was instructed to do this immediately, and I would be refunding the guy pretty much blindly because it’s not like I was seeing double the original agreed amount of money or even the correct amount in my PayPal account. To top it all off, the email was rife with misspellings, incomplete sentences, and bad grammar. The previous emails (aside from the “real” PayPal response) all contained an error or 2, but I thought maybe PayPal was outsourcing their technical support to India or something…the writing in this email was ridiculously bad though.

If red flags had gone up before, big fluorescent flags were going up now. I first contacted the PayPal helpdesk again (the real one), and reported what had been going on, but shortly after doing that I decided that I wanted a more immediate response. I called PayPal’s contact number. My brain was moving at 1,000 miles per hour, but I’m pretty sure I heard the technician say that they had no record of anyone using PayPal with the buyer’s email address, and I’m damn sure that they said there were no pending transactions going on with my account at this time (I think my most recent PayPal transaction according to her was in 2009.)

Even though I think we got off lucky in the end, I could barely contain myself from throwing my phone against the wall once I hung up. I mean, in reality all we lost was the $40 it cost to ship the phone, the hour I spent at the post office, and possibly the phone itself. The $40 and the hour we can never get back, but who knows what will happen with the phone itself. Maybe this Nigerian address doesn’t even exist. Maybe I didn’t do something right when I was filling stuff out like the post office lady said, and it will get sent back anyway. Even if we never see that phone again, it wasn’t being used by us anymore. Sure, we could have made a couple bucks off of it or given it to someone we know, but in the end we won’t miss it that much. What really kills me is the stuff we almost lost. A better scammer would probably have stolen my identity by now, and spent all our money somewhere in the Bahamas. Some assassin movie would probably say about a good assassin something like, “If you know he’s there, you’re already dead.” I think the same kind of idea applies here. We were lucky in that regard I think. I for damn sure wasn’t going to send this bust any money before we actually saw a dime ourselves, so the little overcharged/refund ploy was never going to slide, but the fact that I got strung along far enough to even ship the phone and send this mop package tracking info and all that just burns me up…especially since the whole situation didn’t smell right to me in the first place…especially since with my job I should know this cyber-security stuff like the back of my hand. Do you know how many seemingly endless and useless online training videos I’ve had to sit through about this stuff? And yet I was still almost a victim…kind of embarrassing to tell the truth.

I guess I feel fortunate, but it kind of took the perfect storm for me to buy in, or almost buy in I should say, to what was happening. First, aside from a couple of spelling errors, this guy’s emails were on-point. The logos, banners, and stuff made it look just like an official PayPal email. Even the email address had PayPal in the name. For me to buy in though, I had to think the fake PayPal emails were real, and after I got that helpdesk response back from PayPal basically saying the same thing the “fake” emails had been saying all along they almost had me hook, line, and sinker. After that, I really did think I might get sued or something if I didn’t cooperate. If not for greed or just plain incompetence, this scam artist probably would have had us. I guess $40 and a used phone is an appropriate price for a life lesson though.