Bike Scams

10 Nov 2010

Motorcycles

Recently I've decided to sell my beautiful 2001 Yamaha YZF-R6, known amongst my cirle of friends as 'The Phantom'. Here are some photos:

You can see the advertisement on bikesales.com.au, nothing really too exciting there, however last night I received an SMS from Paul, an interested party.

Those of you who have been following this blog would have noticed that I'm also selling my car as well, and as such have had a fair amount of contact with 'interested parties' over the last few weeks, so when this SMS arrived, and conformed to all the parameters that scammers used, I thought I should post the information here to assist others.

Here's what was odd:

• The SMS arrived in my phone and showed up with a name as though my phone already knew who the contact was. This is an SMS header and can be manipulated
• There was no reply to number
• The English within the SMS was suspect
• The SMS was written like an email

Sure, some of those points can be explained away, however I smelled a rat, especially regarding the SMS headers. I used to work at a mobile company, you really get a feel for what can be manipulated and what can't. Here's the SMS itself:

Is it still available for sale? Is it 100% condition OK? Do you have any picture you can send me ? I can pay right now if you are interested in selling to me. How much are you willing to let it go for? You can email to me paultrieff739@yahoo.com. Regards, Paul

I smell bullshit!