Craigslist - Speech Disabled

I received this email this morning for a listing on Craigslist. The email address was from Paul Martins at [email protected].

"Hello, do you still have this? When can I come check it out? Shoot me an
email back as soon as possible pls I'm speech disabled though, remember to
leave your name and email address when you email back
PS: - You can just reply this email, I'm always with my computer.



Robert"


A couple of things set me off that this was a scam. For one, the guy couldn't even spell Paul right in the email address. If paulmartins was taken on Gmail, the 5 would make sense, but why misspell Paul too? Seemed fishy. The 2nd thing that was a warning flag was the bad grammar. I'm no grammar pro, but I'm always leery of emails with this bad of grammar. Finally, and perhaps the funniest, is even though the email is from a Paul Martins, he signed it Robert. Huh? I thought this was coming from Paul? Hmmm. I will NOT be doing business with this person!

Welcome to Scamwarners slrosenbaum and being suspicious is a necessity nowadays.

Scammers' mailboxes get shut down quickly, so they're always having to open up new ones at high speed, so the name is not the most important thing to them. You may also be surprised to hear that low level scammers from West Africa don't know how to open them themselves and get others to do it, and they'll be paid for working in volumes.

Other pointers

Hello, do you still have this?

By using a form of wording that applies to anything for sale, the scammer can send the same message in reply to hundreds of ads and concentrate on any that reply.

remember to leave your name and email address when you email back

... otherwise he won't know your ad from any of the other hundreds of ads he's replied to.

If you want to be certain, just tell him you have several items for sale and ask which one he's interested in.

Unless you've asked for phone contact there is no reason for him to mention a speech impairment but scammers will either have a foreign telephone number, a re-direct number which can be spotted or they have a very thick accent you'd immediately recognise.

It's not easy to spot a scammer unless your radar is switched on and they'll leave the most incriminating pointers until they've wasted a lot your time with them.

I just wanted to say thanks for posting this and let you know that I also received the same cut and paste message for my craigslist sale today. It sounded fishy to me so I appreciate the warning.

slrosenbaum,
I have a friend named Robert who goes by Paul, but I don't know why a speech problem
should effect his typing skills, I agree this is some type of scam. I love craigslist sold
a lot of stuff on there over the years but have also received some strange replies
as well.

Just remember that not all who say they are speech disabled are scammers. These guys make my life much more difficult