Flashback to monday august 10th

So we want to sell our car, and put a description on autoscout24.be. I called around to quite a number of auto exporters, and found that the price would be in the bracket of 6000-8000. Since I had an offer in hand from our cardealer for 7500, I wrote in the ad 9900 EUR asking price.

After getting quite a number of calls from car dealers who offered anywhere from 6000 to 7000, I got a couple of sms and an email on wednesday asking if the car was still for sale

(if you cannot read the screen captures, you may have to zoom in on the page by using CTRL- middle wheel on your mouse)

Ilse responded to the email 

and so did Daniel

Aha, Daniel is working on a ship or a oil platform? He’s willing to pay our asking price! He wants to use paypal, which is ok with us since I know it is a trusted service and have used it for a number of years. I mail back that I want to be sure that he knows the vehicle has external damage, but is otherwise in good condition. I send him the 13 high res pictures that represent the car and which were also posted on autoscout24.be. I assured him that the car’s interior and motor was in perfect condition. Here is where the class that Ilse took (negotiating till the handshake) kicked in:

We have a pretty good feeling at this point. The poor guy is buying his family on land a nice car, and we are getting our asking price. We know he will be happy with the car, when he has repaired the exterior damage, it will be good as new. The only weird thing is why we have to end the auction? Because he wants to be sure that nobody else got the car?

(Btw crossing out our address made me think back of my youth where I played an awfull lot with etch-a-scetch

Ok, back on topic

Oh, Oh, an address in Ukraine. All kinds of bells and whistles go off. Wait, we have to pay the agent? Why doesn’t he pay his agent? We look up the address with google street view, it turns out to be a side street of the E40 😉 but it does not look like a street with a bustling car agent:Ilse replies:

Daniel admits defeat…

For the record, here are the VERY real looking emails we got from transactiondept.com. Gmail intercepted these in my spam mailbox and did not forward these, so I only found them afterwards:

Moral of the story: If it looks to good to be true, it probably is. Lucky for me I knew paypal does not have an escrow kind of function. Also, we looked in our paypal account ourselves, and did not follow any links on the email sent. And google has a very efficient spam/fishing/junk filter that clearly warned us of the likelyhood that this was a dangerous email.

For kicks, I looked up who owned transactiondept.com: It is registered by domainsbyproxy.com  Their website claims: Your identity is nobody’s business but ours (r)

So it goes…