Put the car on autotrader on Sunday and have since had a few strange emails. Some of them don’t even sound English such as:

—
am interested in your ads… let me know the condition  of the ads…
and your last price for it
—
Hello,  Please let me confirm if this Car is still available for sale if so, can you please tell me the best price you can let this go and more pictures will be gladly appreciated, i am seriously interested in buying and i will really appreciate your quickest response. Please get back to me asap. Thanks.

—

1st doesn’t make any sense and second was asking for pictures when there are already lots on autotrader.

Is this normal? And how do I tell the scammers for the genuine enquiries? I don’t suppose there is any harm in replying to them is there?

had the same, Guido from Malta was going to fly over and drive ours back. He must have got lost, never arrived.
then we found the autotrade pics of our car on his website, up for sale.

I had one very similar, asking stuff that was already in the ad – just ignore, clearly a scam, not worth replying too. Genuine buyers will most likely ring anyhow.

Definite scam. They come up with some tempting offer and for some implausible reason can’t wire you any money until you have paid a transaction fee to release the money from a foreign bank.

Just ignore anyone who doesn’t want to view in person and pay up front.

what like this reply I just got?

Thanks so much for your warm reply.No problem i will be paying you
with my PayPal account because it’s attached to my bank account and
its safe and very secure way to make payment . If my mode of payment
is accepted just send me your paypal email address,(Paypal ID) so i
can pay in right away. Make sure you get back to me so that i can make
the payment. I have a private courier agent that will come for the
pick up after payments has been made, so no shipping included. And if
you dont have a paypal account, you can easily go to http://www.paypal.com
and sign up. its very easy. I await your reply asap

NOTE:I have already contact a shipping company that will handle the pick up.

Yep, classic scam!

I just don’t understand how anyone can fall for this. Just play along …they will soon be asking for the transaction/shipping fee (which they will have included in the asking price) ….

I got the usual deluge of scammers and offers to sell my vehicle for me, but the best response was from the collosal pervert who opened with ‘is that you selling the motorbike there darling?’ and then proceeded with an absolute torrent of filth about what he would like to see and feel me doing!
Unfortunately I’d signed up for a two-week run of ads and the second week he seemed to take it as a personal encouragement to really let rip!

If you think that’s bad, try advertising on pistonheads!

Yep, we got lots of spam, one guy apparently wanting to buy it for his son in Denmark, and we had to organising shipping… needless to say we didn’t bother. Started getting a whole load of insurance phone calls as well which we didn’t have before!

I got bazillions of spam responses when I listed my old bike, most of them using the word “car” quite a lot. The phone calls were the best. “Hello, we’re phoning about your car” “I don’t own a car” “Oh. In that case we’re phoning about your… bike? Yes, bike. And we’re dead interested in it”

So the marine engineer out at sea who wants to buy the car as a secret gift for his brother-in-law, and will pay by paypal and get someone to collect the car, may not be genuine….???

DrP

Been thinking about this this week after getting several more similar emails.

What would happen of I actually game them my paypal account name? would they actually pay money into it?

Paypal can be reversed up to 60 days or something cant it?

I don’t bother with trade-it now because of this.

The Spam goes along the lines of “We will pay you £2000 and you pay the shipping company the difference”

(for an item that costs about 25p )