Not being aware of the whole Nigerian scamming, I followed through with communications and asked her to make the payment to a friend’s Paypal account. She then contacted me saying it was done; my friend got an e-mail supposedly from Paypal saying that the money had been deducted from Linda’s account but that it would be transferred to his account as soon as he emailed them a tracking number; the email address that the message was sent from and the one that they wanted him or me to send them the tracking # weren’t Paypal email accounts, something @consultant.com. This is where I stopped.

I was almost ready to send my laptop out to Nigeria, what a fool! Obviously I didn’t, because I knew that 1) Paypal wasn’t going to hold money from someone after deducting it from someone else’s account, 2) Most services don’t require sending them emails, usually you do everything on their site, including Paypal and 3) I would never give out (send away) something I’m selling without really having been paid for it beforehand.

We need to raise awareness about this, considering this way of scamming is happening all over and in very simple ways. There are people out there, like me before all this; that don’t know a thing about these types of scams and probably don’t know how to differentiate from a fake email and a legitimate email from Paypal, ebay, or any other e-commerce site.