Different Kind of SCAM – Online Sales

I’ve been selling off “stuff” lately if you read my post Just Stuff – Busy These Days.  One of the things I was selling was an older Ford Ranger Pickup.  Had one interested party was going to come and bring cash, bur then they messaged me they wanted me to pay $40 for some vehicle VIN check and send them the report.  I told them there was no chance of that, but if they wanted to pay for a CarFax after they were on my property looking at the truck they were more than welcome to do so.

“Oh, I’ve already decided I’m going to buy your truck, and I’ll pay you an extra hundred dollars over the asking price if you will do this for me so I can look at it while I’m at work.”

My bullshit detector almost melted down.  Nope.  Not gonna happen, but I did run a security check on the link they sent me and it came back as a site running malware.  I looked at the persons online Facebook profile, and it appeared to be fairly new and set to private so you can’t see anything about them.  They tried several different ways to get me to go to the link they shared and agree to pay for their “vin check”, but I refused.  Finally, I said I was just going to sell the truck to one of the other people who made an offer.  They thanked me for, “at least being honest.”  That’s always a left-handed attempt to insult your integrity, but instead of being insulted I thanked them the malware link they sent me.