I Have Been Contacted by a Scammer - What Should I Do?

[CampFireJack]

I placed some ads for a few exotics a while back and I recently received a text from someone telling me that they want to purchase one of them. At first, I was very excited, but as this person and I texted back and forth with each other, I became suspicious. They first told me they were from Boston and then they told me that they were out of the country on business (Africa). Then, they said that they would send a cashier's check to me for $30 more than what I was asking for the animal. All I would have to do is cash it at the bank and then give the remainder back or something like that. I started to lose track of what they were telling me because it was confusing. Then they told me that their shipping company would come and get the animal or something. They were totally trying to scam me.

Do you have any advice for what I should do now? I'm not sure.

 

[JGaulard]

Hi CampFireJack,

Okay, first, you should remove your phone number from your ad. If you do this, any interested parties will need to contact you through our website and to do that, they'll need to register and then reply to your post. We review all replies before they make it on the site and while we can't guarantee that every single one of them is legitimate, the chances of a scammer getting through our defenses is much less likely than having them contact you directly. So that's number one. Don't put any personal information on the internet. And if you do need to reply to someone with some personal information, do so as a reply to their post and then delete your reply immediately. They'll receive your reply and information in their email.

Next, stop all contact with this scammer. Just delete everything you've received from them and don't contact them again. About 95% of scammers that target pet classifieds websites are from Cameroon, Africa and there are internet cafes full of these people over there. How do we know where they're from? We check and block IP addresses all day long. We see where they're from. So the truth of the matter is that it's highly unlikely you'll ever "catch" this person. They hide in the shadows and have gotten pretty good at what they do.

The best route to take is to become educated and aware of fraud on the internet so if you are ever contacted again, you can just ignore the message and delete it.

I hope this helps.

Jay