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“Rich” or “Not so rich”

So, this guy supposedly from Indonesia e-mail’s me about my F100. Says he loves the offer and wants to pay $1400 for it. I was hoping to get $1000, so naturally I was pumped. The catch is that he can only use credit card, but not through PayPal because they don’t service Indonesia.

He then encourages me to seek alternate means of accepting a credit card order. Odd request, I admit, but I humored him and surfed around, looking for how to accept personal credit card transactions. I find a few means of doing so, but they all take a 3 to 5 percent cut from the sale and require sign-up processes and all that garbage. Stuff I can’t do the night of the sale.

So then I start getting suspicious. Couldn’t the guy just send me a money order if he wants it that bad? So I search Google for “ebay Indonesia fraud” and vola! I get some results!

Turns out, Indonesia and a couple other countries are havens for credit card fraud and that it is in fact fairly common for a person to get an outlandish offer for an item from a person in Indonesia. I guess they usually end up buying stuff with a bad credit card and don’t want to go through mainstream credit card systems because they know they’ll get caught.

By Joel Maust

Joel Maust is a marketer, blogger and photographer living in the beautiful Flathead Valley of northwest Montana.

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