I am buying a gator on Craigslist and they want me to pay through amazon. Is this legit or a scam?

[Kimberly]

[Par 4]

Ask to meet in person. If they refuse, pursue this no longer.

[Jake]

Sounds like someone with an Amazon store may be mis-using the classified ads site as an additional advertising channel, I would certainly want to locate the product or similar stuff on their amazon pages to partly verify the business you are dealing with, there are lots of scam attempts on Craigslist which is primarily intended to replace local newspaper classified ads where you would be meeting face to face with someone in your community. I haven't heard of the Amazon payment system being used in scam operations.

[Kittysue]

SCAM

You cannot pay through Amazon unless the item is listed for sale on Amazon.com and you pay through Amazon's payment page

This is a scam where they will send you a fake email that looks like it's from Amazon asking you to send money through Western Union or Moneygram - two payment systems Amazon will not accept. ALL Amazon transactions are through the Amazon.com website, never through email

Tell him you are sorry but you will only pay CASH when you pick up the gator. If they don't agree then don't buy it

Craigslist is ONLY for face to face CASH transactions or you will always be screwed. If you cannot pick up the item in person and hand over cash after you have inspected it, it's a scam

[Excessiverain275]

100% scam.

There is no gator for sale.

There are stolen pictures of someone else's gato

There is only a scammer trying to steal your hard-earned money.

The next email will be from another of the scammer's fake names and free email addresses pretending to be the "amazon" and will demand you pay for shipping fees, in cash, and only by Western Union or moneygram.

Western Union and moneygram do not verify anything on the form the sender fills out, not the name, not the street address, not the country, not even the gender of the receiver, it all means absolutely nothing. The clerk will not bother to check ID and will simply hand off your cash to whomever walks in the door with the MTCN# and question/answer. Neither company will tell the sender who picked up the cash, at what store location or even in what country your money walked out the door. Neither company has any kind of refund policy, money sent is money gone forever.

Now that you have responded to a scammer, you are on his 'potential sucker' list, he will try again to separate you from your cash. He will send you more emails from his other free email addresses using another of his fake names with all kinds of stories of great jobs, lottery winnings, millions in the bank and desperate, lonely, sexy singles. He will sell your email address to all his scamming buddies who will also send you dozens of fake emails all with the exact same goal, you sending them your cash via Western Union or moneygram.

You could post up the email address and the emails themselves that the scammer is using, it will help make your post more googlable for other suspicious potential victims to find when looking for information.

Do you know how to check the header of a received email? If not, you could google for information. Being able to read the header to determine the geographic location an email originated from will help you weed out the most obvious scams and scammers. Then delete and block that scammer. Don't bother to tell him that you know he is a scammer, it isn't worth your effort. He has one job in life, convincing victims to send him their hard-earned cash.

Whenever suspicious or just plain curious, google everything, website addresses, names used, companies mentioned, phone numbers given, all email addresses, even sentences from the emails as you might be unpleasantly surprised at what you find already posted online. You can also post/ask here and every scam-warner-anti-fraud-busting site you can find before taking a chance and losing money to a scammer.

If you google "Cameroon pet scam", "fake puppy sale scam Western Union" or something similar you will find hundreds of posts from victims and near-victims of this type of scam. There are sites where you can look up pictures and find the site or sites where the scammer stolen the pictures of the gator.