Scammers about trolling BoatsandOutboards

[mbird]

I received an email today from someone supposedly interested in my advert for our boat, Serenity. His name is Brine Collins (yeah, right!) brinecollins@gmail.com .Here's how it went...

Hello seller do you still have it and in good condition,get back to me with the final price?

Hi Brine

We do still have Serenity for sale at the moment, but she will be going to a broker next week. If sold private, out lowest possible selling price is £xx,xxx. She is in excellent condition for her age, with a brand new canopy and carpets/teak flooring. She is a lovely boat that we have only sold as we need more room for my growing sons.

Please feel free to call me if you need any further information.

Regards

Great. am glad to read from you ,will appreciate more pictures... i am a marine engineer, i am at sea right now.I am buying this for my son as a surprise promise Gift so am willing to offer you the amount you required. I can only pay through PayPal at the moment as i don't have access to my bank account online(i don't have internet banking with it), but i have it attached to my PayPal account, and this is why i insisted on using PayPal to pay,all i will need is your PayPal email address to make the payments, and if you don't have a PayPal account yet, you can set one up at www.paypal.com it cant take you less than 3mins to do that, i will be expecting your PayPal email so l can pay . I have a pick up agent that will come for the pick up after payments has been sorted.

l will be waiting for your reply asap

Regards Brine

Dear Brine

Please see attached more photos of Serenity. My Paypal account email is the same as this one I am using.

I’m sorry to sound skeptical, but this sounds a bit too good to be true, which always rings alarm bells with me. To be offered money for a boat that the buyer has not yet seen is a bit unusual. I apologise if this is indeed a genuine offer, but I’m sure you can understand my caution.

Obviously the boat would not be released until payment had cleared from my Paypal account to my personal bank, but that only takes a few days.

Regards

Good Mark,

I appreciate the pictures, I have get the in contact with the pick up agent that will come for the pick up,before we proceed i will like to let you know this , i had this little problem now with the picking up, I got email back from my agent.. which i taught i included that in my previous message. he said, he won't come for the pick up unless i pay him the agent commission fee first in order be able to schedule a pick up time ,and all commission payments made for pick up, from anywhere in the world is sent to their head quarters and the only form of payments they accept is western union money transfer and i tried to do it online but i will need a credit card which i didn't bring along, so i want you to help me with the pick up fees, i will include the £900 they charge me for the pick up and delivery to my son home, to the payments i will send through PayPal. After i have made the payments and it has been confirmed by PayPal, i will need you to help me send the £900 to the pick up agent through western union money transfer.........

Let me hear back from you so that I can proceed with the total payment of £xx,xxx once now

Hope to hear from you soon

Regards Brine

Dear Brine

In my cynicism, I have google searched your email address, and guess what? You appear on the Scambook website having tried this little trick before.

Can I therefore suggest the following:

1. Try to learn proper English, as your grammar and sentence phrasing is clearly not the product of anyone in the UK.

2. Come up with a better name (“Brine†for a marine engineer at sea, are you serious?)

3. Try to find some proper employment with doesn’t result in you scamming people out of their hard earned cash.

I have now forwarded all these emails to the Trading Standards office, who I hope will be able to track you down, though I doubt their powers extend as far a Nigeria, or wherever you are based.

So, please now take your low-life leech-like tendancies elsewhere, and do not contact me again.

Regards

Funnily enough, I never got another reply......

[MY littleboat]

On the other hand Mark, I would have loved to have seen you let him transfer the money (Usually shows for a short time but is cancelled almost immediately) You could have then routed it directly out just to see what happens lol

Read about similar scams to this before - remember when Andy was selling his, he even found an advert for his own boat online!

[pks1702]

Was he based in Nigeria Mark.....

[mbird]

Was he based in Nigeria Mark.....

No idea Perry, but that does seem to be where a lot of these types of scams originate according to Trading Standards

[mbird]

On the other hand Mark, I would have loved to have seen you let him transfer the money (Usually shows for a short time but is cancelled almost immediately) You could have then routed it directly out just to see what happens lol

Ah, but he wouldn't send me anything until I'd transferred £900 to him via Western Union....

[senator]

Hopefully non of us would fall for the standard scams but as a follow on post for anyone not following Marks thread on YBW there is another one which could catch a lot more of us.

This one involved someone selling a car for circa£5k but it could be anything up to £25k given that is normally the maximum for faster payment transfers.

A chap turned up to view the car, liked it and offered to pay by direct bank transfer.

He asked for the sort code and account number to transfer the money and after pulling out his ipod was interrupted by an urgent business call on his phone that he had to take, a couple of minutes later he finished his call then completed the bank transfer showing the couple that the payment had been successful.

The couple gave it a few minutes then checked their account to see the money was showing in their account. Fortunately the man selling the car had previously spent some time in banking and spotted that the letters after the amount were cc instead of trf, trf being the normal abbreviation of transfer and cc being for counter cheque.

Realising that something was wrong the police were quietly called while he was kept waiting and the boys in blue rolled up in time to give him a lift.

The business call had been a friend who was waiting in the high street with a dud cheque for the correct amount, armed with the sort code and account number he was able to pay the cheque into the local branch of their bank so that it showed up straight away in their account.

It would be fairly easy to miss the letters and just concentrate on the amount, would have been costly given that insurance won't pay out for theft if you have handed them the keys and this could just have easily been a trailable boat.

[brandenjg]

It amazes me how scammers think people will send them money on the promise of a payment in return.

Sad to think some people fall for them :/ Good job on catching one out though mark

[Bumpazorber]

This scam happened to me too.

I was trying to sell my Nissan Largo and was offered more money for it than I was advertising it for. They didnt want to see it and said they would pay more then I had to pay the man who collected it cash for the overpayment.

I didn't see the problem in this as its a collectable vehicle and had people looking at it from all over the country. I soon cottoned on it was a money laundering scam soon as I started to get loads of such emails all of which seemed to be from people who could barely string an english sentence together!

Madlissa

(2.5 more working days till im sat on the back of san remo 2 hopefully in the sunshine with my vino