I am trying to sell our Elky and was contacted by someone in Canada wanting to pay asking price, without checking out the car at all. We wanted $4000 and he said he would pay $9895 and the excess ($5895) would be paid by me to his shipper to ship the car to Canada. THIS IS A SCAM!!! DO NOT FALL FOR THIS. We called the FBI and asked them if this could possibly be a scam, and they said that they know all about it and advised us not to contact the buyer again. They are working with Canadian authorities to resolve this problem. According to the FBI, the way the scam works is that they send you a bogus check and before you have time to cash it or for it to clear, you must pay the shipper to transport the car. They get $5895 from you and you get scammed. His email follows just incase you receive something like this:

Hi.

Thanks for the timely response.I am at the moment supervising my new
filling station in Canada,I would have my shippier handle the
shipping on my behalf.A check in the amount of $9,895 will be sent
to you and you'll deduct cost of your Truck $4,000 and you'll send
the excess ($5,895) to my shipper to enable prompt shipping of the
Truck.


My pick up agent will be the one to take care of all the necessary
paper works.I will be expecting the name and address you'll want the
check issued with and also your phone #.


Waiting to hear from you,

Mike.

(MARTINAUTOCAR04@YAHOO.COM) :evil: :evil:

Are there people that would fall for this? It seems so obvious a scam.

The only people that fall for this scam are greedy people.

I say we all send this guy Mike an e-mail offering to sell him our Elkys. Do you think he's figure out our scam if he got 2,500 e-mails?

Hi I received the email a couple years ago when I was selling my station wagon before I bought my elky. However they were from like Africa or something like that and they were willing to send a check for something like 10000-15000 dollars more so yeah that has been a scam going on for a long time and I think people must fall for it otherwise why would they still be doing it ya know. Well I am not selling my Elky however I am looking at possibly betraying my elky and purchasing a 1969 Chevelle this coming week but who knows maybe it won't be what I am expecting it to be. My Elky will come first though.

Hey guys;
I got the same e-mail from him after I responded to his initial contact, wanting to know about the car. I'm glad that we work together on these things, because even though I thought it was a scam, there a lot of younger people getting into these cars that need some help and guidance.
I told Mike to kiss my A_ _ !
Don Strautz :mad:

I've gotten those a couple times now. Both for parts I was selling on other auto forums. I wonder how many people fall for these things? I also wonder what the fbi or whoever is really doing about it? The emails I got were both quite some time ago, and yet I see these types of post topics come up a lot relaying the same type of info. You'd think by now something would have been done???

This scam has been going on for a long time. Peter Brown (87SS) posted this link a few months ago.

Scam Alert (http://www.chevelles.com/classifieds/scamalert.html)

Here is a good link to several similar scams.

http://www.scamchecker.com/

Maybe the site admin. could put a link on the front page for a list of known scams and how they work. :bigups: