Craigslist/other sellers-how do you deal with lowballers?

[isaacsquared]

Title pretty much says it all. Until recently, I've been fairly civil, but the ridiculous offers have started to tick me off, so I've gotten a little creative in my responses. Any good stories out there?

[toredauei]

Ive never tried to sell anything on craigslist as it always seemed to iffy for me. I'm interested to hear what your creative responses are though.

[Mozgus]

I dont get that, but I got plenty of scammers trying to convince me to ship my laptop to foreign countries, if they severely overpay me in shipping cost. I just know it's a scam. They all email you with such phony stories as to why they NEED your laptop. They absolutely wont listen to any logical advice.

[toredauei]

what would be the benefit to them in putting most of the money into shipping charges?

[isaacsquared]

My most recent endeavor was asking one person to put "lowball" in the title of any future emails, so I would know not to even bother opening it. That got him good and riled up. I'd say we've sent about 10 emails back and forth. It's a good verbal jousting, though it'd be nice if he cleaned up his grammar.

[gtmtnbiker]

If you don't like someone's offer, you can always counter-offer, ignore the email, or just reply no.

I only had some low offers when I was selling my car a couple of years ago. I just replied no, I have too many realistic offers.

It is interesting to see how the scammers operate. I recently posted some kids stuff for sale in the baby & kids stuff section. I got a couple of emails from someone who sent email to a bunch of ads. Here's one:

Hey

I ran across your craigslist post in the baby and kids listings.

As a hard working woman I guessed you may be interested to be clued in
about this. A few days ago I took possesion of a $250.00 gift card for
shoes simply by visiting this site www.yourfree-gift-card.info

All I did was insert my e-mail address. I received the the $250 gift
gard a week later

I also posted an ad in the electronics section for a car amplifier. I got this response:

Hey there I saw ur ad you posted on craigslist and feel like you are
having trouble with moneyy?? let me know..

Ha ha, what a laugh.

Of course, around the holiday times there are some people posting their sob stories about how they are in financial trouble but they can't disappoint their kids and need to get a Wii/Nintendo DS/etc for a good price. Some pretty stupid people/scammers out there.

[superlarz]

Every once in a while I throw out a lowball offer on something.. If the ad is poorly constructed or it seems like the seller doesnt know what they have, I throw out a lowball. Youd be surprised how many times they take the offer.

[lost_within]

My fav was a scammer wrote me...and I wrote back saying something to the line of...hey piss off and suck on a dah dah dah...he wrote back saying


Ha HA your so funny, and thanks for being so kind...now all I need is your paypal, home address, phone number and name, thanks!

....what a joke.

[retrofuture]

Beware of that guy who shows up after arranging a deal and says, "Sorry man but I only have so and so amount of money" when you both agreed on something much more that. Never happened to me, I heard it from somebody else and they just gave in because of the drive out to the meeting place.
laaaaame

[RyaNtheSlayA]

For the right way to deal with scammers. Here ya go,

http://www.zug.com/pranks/powerbook/