Five Money Scams to Watch Out for on Craigslist Macon

Craigslist scams happen everywhere and Macon, Georgia is certainly no exception. If you think that you might be the victim of a scam, it would be a good idea to find out exactly what types of scams are most prevalent in the area. Regardless of whether or not you think you’re being scammed, you should always use extreme caution when buying or selling on Craigslist. If you want to know about the scams that have been going on in the area, keep reading.

1. Fake Plane Tickets

You see all kinds of scams on Craigslist, but this isn’t one that pops up very often. In Macon, a woman was actually arrested for attempting to sell plane tickets that weren’t really plane tickets. She put an ad on Craigslist advertising tickets that she had, offering to sell them to someone else for a deep discount and providing a sob story about why she couldn’t use them herself. As is the case with most things like this, there were no legitimate plane tickets to be had and the whole thing was nothing more than a scam to con honest people out of their money.

2. The Job Scam

A lot of people want a job where they can work from home and that’s easy enough to understand. The ability to make money from home opens up a whole world of possibilities to most people, especially when it comes to setting their schedule. However, you have to be careful because the overwhelming number of work-from-home ads are not legitimate, regardless of where they come from. In this case, a woman answered an ad on Craigslist that required her to track checks that were paid by a company and do a lot of data entry. The problem was there was no legitimate company, nor was there a job. Instead, they sent her a fake check that was worth more than what they had told her the weekly pay would be, asking her to cash the check, taking out her weekly pay and then sending the rest on to another company. This is an age-old scam and if anyone ever asks you to deposit a check and then turn around and write another one, you should run like the wind.

3. The Car Scam

There are all kinds of scams on Craigslist, and many of them involve automobiles. This is an example of one where a woman purchased a car, only to find out that the car she was buying wasn’t actually the car that was advertised in the ad. Unfortunately, she didn’t find this out until she had already handed over the cash. The car was actually a train wreck that had a rolled back odometer and virtually every trick in the book had been used to make it run without too many problems, at least for a day or two. It didn’t take her long to figure out that the car was virtually worthless, but her money was already gone by the time she came to this realization.

4. The Car Scam Part II

This is another type of car scam that happens a lot on the site. In this case, the car was actually stolen. Of course, the person that bought it didn’t know that and really didn’t know what to look for. You can imagine the surprise that happens when police come knocking on your door early in the morning wanting to know why you’re driving a stolen car. As it turns out, the party that sold it to her gave her that same old tired story about not having a clear title because they still owed just a few hundred dollars, which they would be paying off within a week. She did ask for a Bill of Sale, which is probably the only thing that kept her out of jail.

5. This is Just Despicable

About the time that you think people that are scamming others on Craigslist can’t stoop any lower, somebody posts an ad that they need a caregiver for someone in their family. The problem is, these ads aren’t always legitimate, either. As a matter of fact, it’s becoming more and more prevalent that people are advertising these types of things on Craigslist when all they really want to do is scam you out of your money. They’ll tell you that they need you to forward a certain amount of money to them in order to cover costs associated with doing a background check or something similar, and then you never hear from them again.