How smart are you?

[Kit-Ginevra]

You are renting a room out and put an advert on Craiglist. You receive an answer from 'Lizzy' who is a 'model in Europe' who will be sending some money orders via Western Union for you to cash,take out the rent and send the rest of the cash to her 'agent' in Nigeria.

A) Hoot derisively with laughter at the unoriginality of this.
B) Immediately cash the money orders and then when they turn out to be duds,sue the bank that cashed them.
C) When the bank tries to take the money for the dud orders out of your account,tell them if they want the money they'll have to find 'Lizzy' and sue her themselves.

If your response is A then congratulations you have managed to outwit the geniuses who just starred in Judge Judy. 120 years of age between the pair of them and neither of them managed to deduce this....

[Ironclad Alibi]

Do you know why "Lizzy" keeps doing this? Because it works on some people.

[catcul]

The spelling and grammatical errors should have been the first clue.

[MadMike]

The spelling and grammatical errors should have been the first clue.

That depends. I've seen some that were so bad they were almost unreadable, and I've seen a few where there were few or no errors.

In the case of the latter, a couple of my friends almost fell victim to a rental scam awhile back. Interestingly enough, not owning a printer saved them. They called me and asked to use mine, because they needed to print out a rental application that someone had emailed them. When they told me the story, I thought it sounded scammy, and asked them if they were sure it was legit. They assured me it was, so I told them to come on over.

When I saw the email chain, something seemed off. Nothing was misspelled or grammatically incorrect, although when my friends replied to the message, the reply back started with something like "Thank you for your great response!" Seriously, who talks like that? Then the phone number they were supposed to call looked weird. It was an international number, because the owner supposedly lived in England. I tried googling the number, and while I didn't get an exact match, I did get something that said that numbers starting with that prefix were actually based in Nigeria, and most likely scammers. So then I googled the address of the property to see if I could find any rental listings. I didn't find any, but several real estate listings showed the property as being for sale. By then, I was certain that my friends were about to be scammed, and I was able to convince them of that. They said they were going to call one of the real estate listings the next day to see what's up. It turned out that the property belonged to a woman who was widowed and trying to sell the property, and that this wasn't the first scammer who tried to use this particular property for their scams. My friends were very grateful, but I'm sure the scammer wasn't too happy with me.

[Kristev]

Ruining a scammer is as good as ruining a Christmas.