4 ms·
+1. Plenty of people in the US have a subpar grasp of English (and yet are not retarded). For example, my dad was not born in the US, but has a Masters in Elect
by astral303 14y ago
+1. Plenty of people in the US have a subpar grasp of English (and yet are not retarded). For example, my dad was not born in the US, but has a Masters in Electrical Engineering and used to work on power grid systems. He's a smart guy. However, it took him a good amount of time to recognize phishing e-mails, some of it requiring my guidance. For example, it's not easy to identify Misused Capitalizations, or to pick up on missed article in email, or to recognizing verbs not agreed with time.
Furthermore, it is completely plausible to an inexperienced person that PayPal might enlist FBI to enforce shipment of paid-for goods. It takes some experience in this country to realize that 1) this sort of matter is not referred to FBI unless it's super grave, 2) and not referred to any enforcement entity so fast (less than 30 days), 3) and not referred to any separate enforcement entity without at least several resolution attempts from the original business.
In fact, IMO, it's quite arrogant, on the part of the OP to say this. Unfortunately, this is a typical attitude in the geekdom: if something that's obvious to us isn't obvious to you, you're stupid.
- graue 14y agoI'd still think paying $100 more than the asking price (with no explanation as to why) would be a strong clue something is amiss in this case. But you're probably right that the use of English and the FBI enforcement letter are obvious only to a subset of people who grew up in a Western, Anglophone culture.
- DrStalker 14y agoI only skimmed the article; I'd assumed that was part of the scam (forward the extra $100 on via western union, or paypal it back to me on this different account, etc)
- tvladeck 14y agoIsn't that graue's point though, that it looks like it would be part of the scam and thus should throw alarms?
- sliverstorm 14y agoThe extra money is usually not a scam in itself if they are trying to actually get you to ship the item. Once upon a time scams were all about moving cash, but I surmise those have gotten harder, so now they secure your item and (presumably) resell it. Thus, the promised extra money is actually just a way to both ensure you'll "sell" to them as they made the highest bid, and also perhaps an attempt at triggering just a touch greed which does wonders for putting the blinders on.