Rafael Rodriguez Craigslist scammer

[John DeLaney]

Hi,
Thanks for the response.I am willing to pay your asking price.I will pay by money order as its the only way i can pay you at the moment.I will make arrangement for the pick-up after payment have been received by you. I dont mind adding an extra twenty dollars so you can keep it in my favor.Reply with your full name,cell phone number,and address where payment should be sent.Please take the posting off craigslist today and consider it sold to me.
Expecting to hear from you soon.
Regards
Rafael Rodriguez

[Will wettererjr]

Dear John DeLaney
How interesting to see your posting from july. I just received the exact same offer on an item on craigslist. What did you do, and how did you resolve this. Did you contact the authorities? He says he is sending me the money order, even though I requested cash, so I started to check it out and found your posting. Thanks again for the warning, and if you have any advice, please let me know.

[Ralph]

Hi Will and welcome

John has provided loads of information on this kind of scammer and loves the feedback from those he has helped.

I dont want to steal John's thunder here but there are 2 main things you can do;

1, Tell the scammer that you have sold the item for cash as you do not deal with money orders or cheques.

2. Ignore any future correspondance.

You could report it to the police or to Craiglist which in reality will make little difference, what will help is if you have any details that John has not posted then you can add them here which will help others like you who get a little suspicious and start searching

[John DeLaney]

Hi Will, as Ralph has said above, either of the 2 options are your best idea.

Informing Craigslist may result in the scammer having his email blocked, but as he will have several other email addresses, it may slow him down for all of 10 secs.

If you have any further emails from him please post them in this thread, so a more complete set of his formats is available.

Thanks for letting us know you found out about him before you got stung.

[Will wettererjr]

John, the only other thing I can add is this response from RR:
Hi,
I have given my assistant the go ahead to mail payment to you.You should
receive payment within the coming week( 6-7days time).Once payment is received we can proceed with the pickup.Thanks for your understanding and patience. Regards,
R.Rodriguez

I have taken your advice and will have no more correspondence with him. Again, a million thanks for posting this. Will

[John DeLaney]

Hi Will, thanks for that, the next email would be one where he explains his assistant has mixed up the cheques, and sent the wrong one to you, for considerably more than the original amount, and could you please deduct your amount, and return the overage to him,

Needless to say, the cheque will bounce, and you would have been left out of pocket, with your bank very annoyed at you presenting a fake cheque.

[Will wettererjr]

nice. what's the best route to take? send it back? toss it out? turn it over to authorities? ignore it? mark it refused?

[John DeLaney]

If you're selling a lot of stuff on Craigslist, start a fake cheque collection up, write FAKE over them then start to paper a wall.

Best to take them to your bank, tell them it's a fake, and let them deal with it, or to your local police, and let them make a report.

Don't send them back, they'll just get used again in another scam attempt on someone else.

[flairknocks]

I received an email from him showing interest in my guitar that I have for sale. He didn't ask for details, which immediately threw me off. All he did was ask if it was "available for sale". I said yes and he replied with that same message in the first post. Not dealing with him. Thank you for posting!

[Dan Jones]

Glad to hear you cottoned on pretty fast.

Most scammers will call it "the item" or something similar, but you will gte the odd clever one. Keep an eye out for any more.

[CBROZENICH]

I was contacted as well and also received money orders from him. This person also uses the name Richard Erwin Baver (google it and you'll see the same scam). Rafael699 sends you an email that the wrong money orders were sent to you by accident and he overpaid you. The scam is you cash the money orders, send him the difference, then your bank discovers they are fake money orders and you are required to pay them back. He asks you to cash them, and send him the balance so he can activate his fedex account and pick up the item:


"...send the balance of 1980$ to my daughter via western union so she can reactivate my fedex account that will be used for the pickup of the hutch/crib.Here is her information.


Name: Jennifer Rodriguez
Address: 670 W. Peachtree Street
Atlanta, GA 30308 ,U.S.A

[Ralph]

Hi CBROZENICH,

Welcome to Scamwarners

Thank you for posting the extra details, the more information we have the more likely it is that a potential victim will find out it is a scam before losing money

[lauraato]

I was a victim of the same scammer. He asked me to send a money order for $2230 to his daughter:
> > Receivers Name: Sandra Rodriguez
> > Address: 630 W. Peachtree Street
> > Atlanta, GA 30308 ,U.S.A

I was suspicious and deposited only 1 check. It cleared. Then I deposited the remainder. I waited before sending the money. The checks were fraudulent.

He used the following email addresses:
[email protected]
[email protected]

This occurred on craigslist in December, 2008.

I will be reporting this to law enforcement. If anyone would like more information, please post here and I will reply.

[B. A. Ware]

Hi lauraato,

Welcome to scamwarners

I'm sorry to hear that you were taken advantage of. However I'm glad you posted your experience here. This will help others from being scammed by the same person.

If you have the header of one of his emails could you please post it here.

[samNYC]

I am advertising a musical instrument on New York City Craigslist and received a response identical to the first one listed here (except s/he added "happy holliday" (sic) at the end):

Please take the posting off craigslist today and consider it sold to me.Happy Holliday
Expecting to hear from you soon.

Anyway, the email came from "Jerry Cather" ([email protected]). I googled a phrase from the email and came upon this page.

That's a wicked scam. Thanks, scamwarners! And also, kudos to Craigslist for inserting a header warning about money orders and distant buyers in all their response emails.

Sam