Nick Glover

I’ve been trying to get rid of all my unnecessary belongings recently so that I have less to worry about when I move and I’ve come across a lot of people trying to cheat me out of some money, so I thought I’d post a little information on the obvious signs someone isn’t interested in what you’re selling.

• Probably the first sign is really bad English. That’s not always going to be true, but if they ask things like, “Can you tell me the presently condion?” chances are they are scammers.
• If they refer to what you are selling as “the item.” Most real people will refer to whatever it is you’re listing by name (not always, but be wary).
• The next sign is if they tell you they want to buy it for someone out of the country or they are currently out of the country and want you to ship it to them. At least half of the offers I received were from people who wanted to surprise a family member overseas with a nice gift. Uh huh. Sure.
• Actually, just avoid shipping in general. There was another guy who wanted me to ship it to him, and it seemed legit enough that I even went so far as to have him send me a check, but it looked very fake and was for a good $800 more than I asked for. He, of course, said I should just deposit him and send him a check for the leftover amount as if he had accidentally sent me that much more.
• If you send them a reply and their response is from a different email address or has a completely different name, there’s a good chance it’s not a real person interested in your sale.
• If they offer you more than you’re asking for, it’s a scam. This one should be fairly obvious, but just in case it isn’t, think about it for a second. Are you really going to offer someone more money than they are asking for? I don’t think so. Neither is anyone else.
• If they refer to you as “my friend” all the time, avoid them. Okay, so this one might not always apply, but some scammer did that to me and it was annoying enough that even if he was a real person I wouldn’t have sold it to him.

That’s not an exhaustive list by any means, but it should cover the basics. Trust your instincts. You’re not obligated to sell to anyone just because you emailed them a couple of times.

There were a couple articles on other blogs a little while ago about ways to bypass the lengthy voicemail intros many carriers use. You know how it goes: “‘Hi, this is Nick, leave a message after the beep.’ To leave a callback number, press 1. To send a numeric page, press 2.” The articles I read attribute this annoyance to carriers wanting to use up more of your minutes, thus costing you more money, but when you really think about it, that reason doesn’t make any sense. First, that only works with pay-as-you-go plans, which limits how much money they would actually make from it (though I imagine there are still a large number of those users). More importantly, though, is that the carrier with the long voicemail intro is not likely to make any extra money by forcing the annoyance on us. I’m on Verizon, and if I call other Verizon users, I do not use any minutes, so the long intro makes no difference. If I call someone on a different network so that I am actually using minutes, that other network does not get any extra money from me; Verizon is the one that benefits. Not everyone gets to call their own network for free, I suppose, but it seems to me that most of the money made from long intros goes to competing networks, so it would actually be in each carrier’s best interest to shorten the intros. But maybe I’m just missing something.