Well, I'll be damned. Second case, totally different.
Ms Kristina Wilkinson puts up an innocuous looking ad on gumtree for a furnished apartment in Hamilton. Sound normal, sure, I send a simple email enquiry, get a response offering the ENTIRE apartment for less than the rent of a room. Excuse = she is overseas, finding it difficult to organise renting the place out from all that way.
Hmnnnnnn. Well, getting suspicious. But still has not asked for anything spurious. OK, I reply civilly, show interest, even offer to engage a cleaner from all the money I'd be saving
Anywho, in my emails, besides gushing about the generosity of the offer, I chuck in a few innocuous questions in-between.
OK, 2 days on from first contact, I'm supposed to be getting an email from eBay, only, I get two. Only, it's not really from eBay and asks payment in western union. Now, in all this, they never answered my bloody questions. I asked for a phone call to confirm that they are genuine and it never happened. So bloody obvious!
Last email from 'her':
The complete address is: 12004/8 Harbour Road, Hamilton, Qld 4007
I started the official procedure and eBay will notify you about this matter via email( please check your email address including your bulk/junk folder and let me know if it's there....if you will not receive the email in 2 hours max please email me asap).You'll also receive important guidelines plus instructions from them in 2 hours max(please go through them exactly). Now you must send them the money in the next 24 hours. I used before eBay and I used Western for the money transfer. I suppose that you'll use the same service. If so, I can tell you two secrets about Western:
I filled my phone number on the transfer form and I can tell you that I've been called by them every day for commercial purposes until I had to change my phone number.After that I filled a WRONG phone # on the form and resolved this issue(I changed my last digit of my phone number).
Thank you!
---------------------- Well, I've seen them respond to ads with scams but this setting up trap ads is new.
In case anyone likes to scam bait -
[email protected]