Attention: Many many fake offers on German kleinanzeigen

[junobg]

I can confirm the scams - and unfortunately they are not aimed only at HP collectors. I got scammed too trying to purchase a TI. Should have known better!

Anyway - I am now much more careful and usually pay attention to the following:

1. Low ball offers are usually eagarly accepted as long as the payment is made via PayPal Friends. First red flag.

2. The PayPal email / name does not match the seller name. Some scammers even accept bank payments, but the account does not have a German IBAN or it’s a Wise / Transferwise account. Second red flag. At this point I walk away and report the scammer.

3. But stopping here is not much fun, so sometimes I proceed with asking the seller to put some random numbers in the calculator and send me a photo of the display. As you can imagine - all sorts of excuses follow and some of them are very entertaining.

I always report them as that usually results in the ad bring deleted shortly after by Kleinanzeigen.