Harakiri in style

Craigslist is great! A free billboard for just about any place and for just about anything. My wife found a job in Columbus and we have been depending on it for quite a few needs..right from a roomate to tickets to finding a used car...Nobody can match it's openness, the fact that is free and the fact that it has such a lot of "visibility"..Ask anybody anything and the first reply you hear is, "Have you looked at Craigslist?"....Great thing, ain't it?

It surely is!! But for every system that has a lot of benefits, there are abusers. There will be! Otherwise, this world wouldn't be interesting. In our pursuit of finding a new old car, we met one such. We saw a post in Craigslist that looked very promising, so promising that the deal looked deceptive :P...a honda for $4000 less than market value! Interesting, very interesting....

So, we couldn't hold our greed and ofcourse contacted them..my wife did...we got back a reply a day later from the seller asking for more details and mentioned a company that could do our transaction "online"..somebody like an escrow agent. She said we could try the car for 7 days and return it back if we didn't find it good...sounded too good to be true :)...So, then started our investigation...

We asked her for the VIN..she gave us the VIN and also a carfax report...Well, we ran our own check and that report was wrong :P..too bad for her..

Just for the heck of it, we contacted the escrow company..with great difficulty we got their e-mail address and sent an e-mail to them. We got a response in 5 minutes! And the response said that this lady was trustworthy etc etc...Great, somebody was vouching for this lady! How very silly on their part :P...

So, we said, lets humor ourselves a little more and then we went and looked up this new third party escrow company's DNS "easyasales.com"...for our amusement and yours, that DNS was created the day before!!
So, this lady or man, whoever it was did all this and all in style! Tried to look professional...maybe somebody else would've believed them, but luckily for us, we didn't and it helped :)

We went a filed a complaint at http://www.ic3.gov/ about this scam...so, if you are buying something on Craigslist, better be sure or gEt ReAdY fOr ThE rIdE !