Five Money Scams to Watch Out for on Craigslist Brownsville
In this wonderful digital era, life never got more convenient and dangerous. In the advent of social media and e-commerce websites, people no longer brick and mortar enterprises to do business. Craigslist is a website unlike any other e-commerce website you may have encountered. It is designed to suit the purpose of online garage sales and website poster advertising. The site fulfills diversified transactional needs for its users, and it has even played part in the matching of employers and employees. Unfortunately, with the rising popularity of Craigslist comes the rising unpopularity of Craigslist scams. We cannot cower from using the internet to advance our trade agenda. Each new day comes with new scammers and different ways to scam. Therefore, the best thing we can do is arm ourselves with information, stay vigilant and continue transacting. Speaking of arming ourselves with information, the following are five money scams to watch out for in Craigslist Brownsville in particular.
1. Fake Craigslist Sites
People in Brownsville, just like the entire United States, absolutely love what Craigslist can do for them. The Craigslist brand is pretty popular, and most people visiting the site probably heard about it from friends and family. Scammers know this fact well enough to take advantage. A lot of people are reaped off daily by transacting via fake Craigslist websites. Scammers design websites that resemble the Craigslist site and use domain names that are almost like the real Craigslist. The only way to survive this type of scam is to know that the real Craigslist website is hosted at http://www.craigslist.org and not anywhere else.
2. Foreign Ads
Not to say that foreigners on Craigslist are all scammers, but I would like to remind you that even Craigslist recommends local transactions. Generally, it just isn’t worth it using Craigslist to do international business. You have Amazon, eBay and Alibaba for such businesses because they have the infrastructure and escrow services for it. You should always look forward to Craigslist deals that include the prospect of meeting up at Brownsville. Long distance deals that geo-locationally hinder personal meetings often require you to send money for goods or services that you might never receive. Non-local ads are some of the most suspicious Craigslist deals that you should question first.
3. Fake or Cancelled Tickets
The sale of fake, canceled or non-existent tickets for entertainment, charity, corporate and travel purposes is quite rampant on Craigslist. It is actually very confusing because there are numerous other avenues through which people can trade tickets more securely. The trade is mostly premised on the fact that tickets are always cheaper at earlier stages when they are in large supply. However, as events near and their perceived popularity grows, ticket holders begin hiking the ticket prices. Other people run to Craigslist to liquidate tickets that they don’t intend to use at throwaway prices. Buyers on Craigslist often indulge in the buying with the intention of saving funds or making profits. Unfortunately, it is difficult to tell apart fake tickets on Craigslist from the real ones especially because scammers are often pretty good graphic designers. They can fake watermarks, logos and holograms. You probably won’t see the scam coming until it’s already gone with your hard earned money. If you would like to travel, why don’t you just go to a local airline and buy tickets that aren’t canceled? If you like attending events, you should also open another tab on your browser and go to reputable ticket selling websites.
4. Fake Escrow Service Site
Craigslist scammers are always more informed than their unsuspecting victims. That is the sad truth. They know that people are afraid of scammers. What do they do about it? They scam you by pretending to be scam-preventing escrow services. Escrow services are always offered by third parties when two parties desire to transact online but lack enough trust for any of the parties to yield value before the other. A fake escrow service will assure you of receiving whatever you are buying if you deposit the buying amount to them. Afterward, they just leave you without your money or purchase.
5. Fake Craigslist Purchase Protection
This is probably the boldest of all Craigslist scams. The site isn’t at all a financial service, but an advertising platform. It simply doesn’t offer any purchase protection service. If you receive any email or text messages about Craigslist Purchase Protection, just block that scammer and redirect all of their messages to your spam folder.
