Our first review

In this first ever craigslist spam review we hope to help those who may have received this scam email  while poke fun at those scammers who make our craigslist posting life SO fun!

Original Email:

** CRAIGSLIST ADVISORY — AVOID SCAMS BY DEALING LOCALLY
** Avoid:  wiring money, cross-border deals, work-at-home
** Beware: cashier checks, money orders, escrow, shipping
** More Info:  http://www.craigslist.org/about/scams.html

Hi , how are you doing over there???. I and my Husband (Mr and Mr Larry Larson) and we want to rent your vacation for our coming to your
location for 8days, Please get back to me to know if is still available for us and we don’t have any Pet.

Best regard to you.
Mr and Mrs Larson.

Overal review: 2 out of 10

Greeting: (3 out of 10) Polite but confusing. I love a polite guest as much as anyone else but typically when someone asks me “how I’m doing over there?” I’m either a. falling behind in a group run or b. have just had my foot run over by a bus.  Further, though English has failed to embrace the thrice repeated question mark as much as it has the triple axle of punctuation known as the ellipses  (i.e. …) I can only imagine that “???” would imply something along the lines of “no seriously, it really looks like that bus crushed your foot, how are you doing over there???”  Confused, yet genuinely interested, I pressed onto the body of this spam scam.

Body: (1 out of 10) Something about a husband named ‘Mr. and Mrs. Larson’ smacks of scam. Look, English is a difficult language to master, and though it may seem obvious enough that the parantheses is reserved for listing an example some scammers just can’t figure this out.  As a result we get this gem:  I and my Husband (Mr and Mr Larry Larson) Frankly, I had a very difficult time moving onto the rest of the email while I was stuck with the vision of a poor couple trying to introduce themselves in this never ending matryoshka doll of greetings “I’m Mr. and Mrs. Larson and this is Mrs. Mr. and Mrs. Larson.”

Either way, my interest was piqued when I realized that my guests wanted “to rent your vacation for our coming to your location for 8days” An 8 day rental!  What an opportunity.  I wasn’t sure whether these guests meant that they wanted to rent our vacation rental for their home coming to our location.  Further, it seemed kind of odd that the scammers wouldn’t even bother customizing my location to at least where my vacation rental was.  Alas, it wasn’t meant to be.

Misc: (5 out of 10) No pets is clearly a plus! If I was at all put off by their scam email I was surely lured back in by the thought of locking down yet another “pet free” rental!  Clearly, these scammers knew how to close a solicitation.  With best regards to me, I managed to chuckle for a second as I clicked spam and sent these spammers to the spam box once and for all.

So that’s it!  If you’ve received this scam email or one like it let us know what you thought.  We’d love to hear from you.