I just wanted to share this:
I am selling a diamond and gold necklace on Ebay. Nothing expensive and was asking for a starting bid of $219.00. At the last moment, there was a bid! I was very pleased to have sold my necklace. I received an email from Ebay saying the guy had requested my contact info and listed what they gave him, which included my phone number. There was no message in the email so I wrote back through the Ebay messaging system and asked if he had any questions. He said he had sent me a text and to text him back asap. I told him the phone number was a landline and didn't do texts. He wrote back and said he needed me to send him an invoice through PayPal (instead of Ebay) so he could pay more easily. Hmmm. I thought this was a little strange because paying through PayPal is easy as 1-2-3 on Ebay. But, I thought what the heck and made him an invoice on PayPal. This required me send it to a private email address instead of through the Ebay messaging system.
The PayPal invoice included my private email address, so now he had my phone number and email address. One thing I did not do is send any email directly from any of my personal email addresses from my PC. Anyway, I get two emails that appear to be from PayPal. One saying he had paid $249.00 and the other one saying I needed to ship the necklace in order to get a tracking number at which point the funds would be available in my PayPal account. Hmmm.. I thought this was a little strange, so I did some research on PayPal about scam email.
This guy was good, but I thought it a little strange that both of the email had [Norton AntiVirus] on the subject line. I have seen that before but never really knew what it meant. The emails both had legit addresses and almost looked good in the body of the email. One thing I noticed was two slight grammatical errors. Another was that the salutation on the emails wasn't what I normally see when PayPal sends me mail. So, I forwarded both of the emails to PayPal's spoof address and sure enough the guy was attempting to scam me. PayPal sent me replies to both message saying that they were both bogus. All said.. if I had not seen the [Norton AntiVirus] on the subject line, I probably wouldn't have inspected the email messages so thoroughly.
Also, I had asked the guy why he "paid" $30 more than what I was asking and he said it was because he wanted it sent Express Mail, which isn't an option when you print Ebay labels. The guy was trying to keep me away from Ebay as much as possible, because they have safety precautions built into the process of selling, collecting and printing labels. About the extra $30. Scammers often overpay so then they say "oops I made a mistake, could you refund the extra back to me". That way, they get your sale item and an extra $30 to boot without paying a dime!
I just wanted to post this in case it can help someone else save their identity or money. Thanks NIS!