I've recently been scammed out of $3050 attempting to sell some furniture on Craigslist. I've moved to a different state, so I was selling furniture in my old house, 2 states away. Being busy, distant and fairly numb to scams, as I've had YEARS of good dealings online, I bought the unlikely story (unlikely in hindsight...) and was owned.
The scheme was basically that they wanted to buy my item. Their "secretary" sent me the mover's check and the mover my check. I was supposed to cash the check, wire the difference to the mover and arrange for pickup. I would have opted to pay the mover in person, but I'm not in the vicinity anymore. I waited for the check to clear into my bank account before wiring the funds, but it turns out that the money clearing into my account was not indicative of the check actually clearing the issuing bank. Check is returned, the wire transfer is picked up, and I'm out $3050.
Doing a post-mortem, I discovered the following site:
http://pr-me.blogspot.com/2008/05/list- ... names.html
I hope this may be useful to someone else. The perp. in my case was "Nina Myers" (momanina@live.com). Had I watched 24, I probably would have picked up on this scam...
Another thing that would have tipped me off is Microsoft's policy of adding the X-Originating-IP header to outbound e-mails. All the e-mails from "Nina" were from 41.219.208.121 - Nigeria. The last e-mail was from an IP that is local to where my furniture is. Yahoo also includes the IP of the submitter in the first Received header (from [IP] by <webserver> via HTTP).
Just wanted to share. I'll be glad to answer questions if I can be of help to anyone.