"this is good for you girls... a learning experience" i heard my dad's voice say at 8am this morning when i checked my voicemail before class....
I was officially part of a scam, and it doesn't feel good. Luckily the only thing i lost was 2 hours of my time- and avoided losing any money.
In the process of trying to find 3 sublters for our apartment this summer, my roomies and I put our apt up on craigs list. Normal- okay. Two weeks later we get an email from an interested dude who has a series of questions about the apartment... room sizes and descriptions, what parking is like, what shopping and grocery stores are near by...etc. It seemed like a stock email that he had sent out to more than one person, but we figured he made it general because he was interested in more than one place. So what did we do? We wrote him back the sweetest email ever detailing the apartment and what we are near in the city. We included pictures of the rooms of the apartment (which we cleaned for...) and I spent the time, using my mad blogging skills, linking up appropriate things we are near (laundry 101, the terrace, amys...the good places).
So after all of this time and effort we send him an email back only to get the craziest response back ever. A really long explanation of how he's from England, he is renting this place out for his niece because she did well in school this semester and now she's going to vacation here...how his dad is sick and he's going out of town so everything needs to be done asap...the list goes on. We all were like...uhh.... strange, but okay? Then we got to the kicker. He was going to send us a chasiers check for $4000 and have us cash it, keep the money for the first months rent, then wire the money to his niece (who by the way was an apparent super model from the pic he attached) who would use the money to buy a plane ticket to come to the US.
Officially creeped out, I called my dad this morning when i woke up and began to explain the situation. Before i could get the the main part of the story...he rattles off..."so the guy from out of the county offered you a ton of money to cash in the us and wire back to him but you get to keep some..."
EXACTLY i thought.
"Scam" my dad says... Apparently a few of his buddies at work sell things online (cars and such) and they get these emails all the time! They get all excited (like me) and then when they write back what are they left with?
apparently with 2 hours less time in their day, some interrupted library time, and a model shot of some girl.
