This is the tear-jerking story about a woman whose husband dies twice in one year. It was in the Fall of 2016 that he first died and this caused Mary to need to sell his old truck, a 2002 Toyota Tacoma. He later died again around May of 2017 from a heart attack, leading Mary to list a 1990 Monterey Road Ranger Trailer on Craigslist because there were far too many bad memories associated with it.
Now, I know you're thinking, wait. Hold up. This ain't making much sense.
And I thought so, too, so I spent the next day trying to make sense of it, filling in the blanks of the story.
Wait, I get it. Maybe she actually had two husbands (one that she married shortly after the death of the first one), and this little trailer was where the first husband found the cheating wife with a new man during his last few months fighting a diagnosis of prostate cancer? This is where all those bad memories stem from. It was her guilt.
Problem solved. Holes in the story have been filled in.
But this conclusion would have been too easy.
Let's start from the beginning again.
This is Mary Baldridge's story, a scammer I recently encountered on Craigslist.
I first messaged her asking to see pictures of the interior of the trailer she had posted.
Her initial message had some red flags. Here is the copy of our exchange:
This is when my detective work began. Better to look into this now than end up being more broke because of it. I haven't been all that trusting in a long time (everyone's trying to get something from someone these days, it seems), and it's good to be skeptical, I guess, cause I don't like being played a fool. So onto the details that I wasn't about to just ignore:
Maybe I have a preconceived idea about how people reply on Craigslist, but it's typical for sellers to give you less than you ask for rather than more. I asked, simply, for interior pictures. Mary replies with a very long message giving more detail about the trailer, assuring it's more than worth the price, and even gives me some personal details about her life.
It may not seem like such a stretch that I would receive this length of a message (after all, it could be copy-pasted) but if she was willing to write this much, why wouldn't this all be written in the actual Craigslist posting rather than to each interested person individually?
Now, I don't think it's unheard of for people to give strangers details about their personal lives, especially when it comes to the older generation (those that grew up actually communicating to their neighbors and value more interpersonal relationships than many people do now). However, the topic of her husband's death and family move still comes up out of the blue, and it raises a flag because scammers tend to try to explain why a purchase needs to happen a certain way, often over-explaining, to make sense of a nonsensical proposal.
I think this aspect of scammer messages is as equally important to pay attention to as that often used saying "if it's too good to be true, it probably is." If something sounds off, listen to the gut feeling.
The next part of the message is the biggest red flag. I'm being told to use another service. If she lives in Nebraska, why is business being done through the Central Valley, California listings on Craigslist?
From Craigslist's scam information page: https://www.craigslist.org/about/scams
Deal locally, face-to-face—follow this one rule and avoid 99% of scam attempts.
Pay attention to: “claims your transaction is guaranteed, that a buyer/seller is officially certified, OR that a third party of any kind will handle or provide protection for a payment” (Ebay, in this case)
So I decided to do the laziest form of sleuthing in the modern age. I googled her name “Mary Baldridge”. The first result is from fightthescams.com. This is how I learned that her husband also died last year. And I found a thread on Ebay alluding to this same person and scam.
This is not the first time I've confirmed my suspicions from a quick Google search. I wonder why these kinds of people don't create new aliases for each new scam, at the very least. But let's not give them any ideas.
So though I was pissed that my time was wasted, at the same time, I enjoyed getting to know Mary, grieving with her about her two dead husbands, and sending her an equally bullshit reply:
My sarcasm is no match for the robotic replies of this scammer operation.
What you see here is a very generic reply, probably sent to anyone that doesn't send a direct "yes" or "no" message. It restates a lot of what she already wrote, giving the impression that this is nothing more than a copy-pasted reply to me. Again, you can see that her main focus is to get my personal information. The process will not progress until I give her these details.
So I sent her one more bullshit message just for the hell of it.
This is gold. If I want to cancel the transaction at any time, I will be charged nothing. Her P.S. states that the shipping and delivery fees will be supported by her. So what about the previous buyer who "already paid for the shipping charges"? She claims to cover shipping, but she didn't for the other buyer. Or will she only cover my shipping fees, because they were paid for by someone else who didn't receive the item? Sounds like a stand-up seller. But obviously, none of this is real anyway.
You'll see a lot of inconsistencies in scammer messages if you read them closely. Don't just let these red flags slide. As with anything dealing with money "read the fine print". Keep in mind that these people will do anything to get on your good side. They will give you sob stories about someone close to them dying or their health and financial issues. They will bring God into it with sayings like "God Bless" to try to come across as having values and morals (being against thievery). They will try to connect with you by finding a common interest or saying that they have had similar experiences. Be wary. It's always easier to judge a person's true intentions face to face. These people take advantage of doing these scams behind a screen.
Take care. Don't get played.