So, a funny thing happed to me today...

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Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2010 1:29 am

Alright, my family and I are attempting to relocate to another state. I was on craigslist searching for rental property in the area we are trying to move to. I was at work, and replied to the ad for a nice house. I replied from my work email. Well, I work in law enforcement, and it is clearly stated in my email address that I do so, so I was pretty surprised when I opened my email and saw that the owner of the house had replied, and apparently they are out of the country, and have been for some time, working in West Africa for WEST AFRICA NETWORK FOR PEACE BUILDING. I started laughing so hard. I told my supervisor about it, called my wife and told her. Anyway, I thought it was pretty funny that he would even reply to my email. Improper puncuation, bad grammer, you know, the typical stuff. You'd think he'd at least go to the effort to make it look nice. Oh well. I'm going to start baiting him from my baiter account.
Kinda bums me out though, it was a pretty decent house at a good price.

Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2010 1:54 am

^^I lol'd when I read your post. These vermin are so frickin' clueless most of the time, it's unreal. Or maybe they assumed you'd assumed the identity of a law enforcement person, or maybe they just don't care. Evil or Very Mad

I'm voting for the latter. Good luck with your bait, sounds like this one could be fun. beating

Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2010 5:26 am

Hey St. Aloysius ... sorry about the house. Craigs list is swimming with lads so it seems. Pity.

Just a thought ... I'm in OZ and when our police send 'official' emails, they use some sort of official stationery. Might not want to play with the lad from a work based email addy and sure don't want to add to their kit.

Just a thought. Smile

Slug them until they weep blood. Twisted Evil

Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2010 5:53 am

^^I'm not even going to respond from my work email. Uncle Sam would have my hide.
I'm going to look the ad up from home and and contact him from my baiter account.
It really sucks that it was a scammer too, all my work emails have my name, title, work address, phone number, fax number, and official "watermark".
Hopefully after I don't respond, they'll just scrap it.

419Eater is my life Joined: 11 Dec 2009 Posts: 316

It comes to my mind that it would be best practice to answer to an craigslist-ad firstly from an baiter-address, and later - when it`s clear it is not a scammer, to tell why in the first contact NOT the real personal address was used.

I do understand your disappointment, I had a similar situation whilst searching for a flat. ... it was nearly to good to be true, though we hoped it COULD be true....

---

edit: ... other idea is to answer from a disposable / temporary email-address.

Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2010 12:25 pm

We listed a place for rent on Yahoo free ads a few years back. The only replies I got were from scammers who wanted to ship their stuff ahead of their arrival. Typical fake check scam but I didn't understand how the game worked at that time. I didn't fall for it because it didn't pass the "smell test" with me but I can understand how many can get duped.

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