This past weekend, my wife started bugging me about selling our old iPhones that are sitting on the shelf. I said ok fine and posted them to Kijiji. Kijiji is like Craig’s List. It is a free listing site with a million upgrade features for a fee (of course).

Just for your reference, I live in London, Ontario Canada. In Kijiji, you can specify your location, so that it makes it a lot like the old days with classified ads in the newspaper.

So, I posted a couple of the iPhones. About 15 minutes later, I got my first “fishy” text from 201-564-4491. Somewhere in New Jersey USA. Here’s what this one sent:

Okay..thanks i have no problem with the price and i will like to know the present condition of the item because am getting it for my son as birthday gift,but am On a Business Trip right now and I will be happy if you can help me
ship it to my son i will pay you extra $200 for the shipping cost to my son.THANKS

Followed by

i need it to be shipped to my son in west africa as gift via canadapost and i will be paying you first

Next was 916-292-7599 (from California) and they sent:

Sounds Good, I am actually buying this as a surprise birthday present for my friend who works abroad , i am gonna offer $850 for everything if you promise it gets shipped to him in good condition. Do you have a PayPal account?

And then 713–322-0615 (from Texas) sent:

OK, am interested to buy send but i wasnt arond now and i want it

Followed by:

for my daughter before i get home.so send me your PayPal email in order to make the payment as soon as possible.

Just to have some fun, I asked the last one if there wasn’t any used iPhones for sale in Texas – I never heard back from them. 🙂

Seriously, talk about dumb. All these people out there trying to scam people but they are all attacking the same sellers. I mean REALLY, offering me an extra $200 for shipping (the 2nd one offered an extra $150 for shipping). Talk about red flags.

I called PayPal just out of curiosity and they said they get a lot of these where phones are shipped out of country and claim either they didn’t receive it or that it is damaged then request that the transfer be reversed.

I told the first person no ‘Canada Post’, I only use Fedex, and I never heard from them again.

The bottomline is that it is: scam, scam and more scams. Anything that is non-local, I’m just going to toy with them and have some fun. Offer them some really cool extras, like Bose noise cancelling headphones. 🙂

Regards,
Roger Lacroix