BEWARE of possible fraudulent replies to IBMWR Marketplace Ad listings. It has come to our attention that several Marketplace advertisers have received responses to their Ads that offer high prices, where the seller is to cash a large check from a third party, for more money than the agreed-upon price, deduct the price of the item for sale, and forward the remainder of the money with the sale item to the buyer.

These offers appear to be FRAUDULENT, and derivative of the ubiquitous "Advance-Fee Fraud" spam emails that many of us receive regularly. The scam is that the large cashiers check turns out to be a forgery; unfortunately this does not become known until after the balance is forwarded to the "buyer". You may be surprised that a bank that has cashed a "bearer instrument" cashiers check WILL reclaim its funds if the check is a forgery. Cashiers checks are not as secure as many of us had always presumed.

So please be careful in accepting any offer that seems "off" or "too good to be true", any overseas transactions, and any sale that requires a seller to advance or refund any amounts paid. If you allow yourself to be victimized by such scam artists, you may be left holding the bag.

We are not pleased one bit that this sort of fraudulent activity is now permeating the Internet, and has reached the IBMWR Marketplace. As always, the IBMWR Marketplace is merely an automated free listing service and cannot assume any liability of any kind for any of the advertisements or transactions that flow from them.

If you are approached with this obvious scam, you may want to pass the information along to the Authorities. The Federal Trade Commission website (also linked below) asks folks who have been approached with this scam or have been unfortunately taken by it, to contact them. The site lists e-mail addresses, telephone numbers and has a handy web-based fraud report form. Your taking a few minutes to fill this out may just keep a fellow Rider from falling prey.

OR, take a tip from Jim Mason: "Rather than the FTC website, here is a place to find out where the scam is coming from. Note the instructions for determining the sender's IP address and then using arin.net to find out the sender's ISP. You can then forward the fraudulent email to the tech contact for that ISP and maybe get the offender's account terminated! (Well, we can dream can't we?) This is as close as you can get to reaching through the monitor and squeezing their pointy little heads off."

Links to more information:

   Federal Trade Commission

   Scam Victims United

   The 419 Coalition Web Site

   Nigerian Net Scam

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