There is no buyer. Cease emailing that scammer and his fake Paypal email address.
Notice how the scammer doesn't call what you are selling by name? He uses the generic word "item", that is because he sends the same stock copy/paste email to anyone selling everything that he can find and he has no idea what you are selling and doesn't care.
There is only a scammer trying to steal your possession AND your money. The scammer isn't interested in your identity or bank account only in convincing you to ship your possession to him without him sending you a penny.
The next email will be from another of the scammer's fake names and free email addresses pretending to be "Paypal" saying "kindly send the tracking number and we will release the funds". Then the scammer will send another email from "Paypal" and say he "accidentally" sent too much money and you have to "refund" the "buyer", in cash, via Western Union.
Paypal does NOT send such emails, ever. Paypal does NOT have escrow or money holding services like that scammer describes. Paypal does NOT demand you send a tracking number before money is sent. EVER. No exceptions.
Western Union and moneygram do not verify anything on the form the sender fills out, not the name, not the street address, not the country, not even the gender of the receiver, it all means absolutely nothing. The clerk will not bother to check ID and will simply hand off your cash to whomever walks in the door with the MTCN# and question/answer. Neither company will tell the sender who picked up the cash, at what store location or even in what country your money walked out the door. Neither company has any kind of refund policy, money sent is money gone forever.
Now that you have responded to a scammer, you are on his 'potential sucker' list, he will try again to separate you from your cash. He will send you more emails from his other free email addresses using another of his fake names with all kinds of stories of being the perfect buyer, great jobs, lottery winnings, millions in the bank and desperate, lonely, sexy singles. He will sell your email address to all his scamming buddies who will also send you dozens of fake emails all with the exact same goal, you sending them your cash via Western Union or moneygram.
You could post up the email address and the emails themselves that the scammer is using, it will help make your post more googlable for other suspicious potential victims to find when looking for information.
Do you know how to check the header of a received email? If not, you could google for information. Being able to read the header to determine the geographic location an email originated from will help you weed out the most obvious scams and scammers. Then delete and block that scammer. Don't bother to tell him that you know he is a scammer, it isn't worth your effort. He has one job in life, convincing victims to send him their hard-earned cash.
Whenever suspicious or just plain curious, google everything, website addresses, names used, companies mentioned, phone numbers given, all email addresses, even sentences from the emails as you might be unpleasantly surprised at what you find already posted online. You can also post/ask here and every scam-warner-anti-fraud-busting site you can find before taking a chance and losing money to a scammer.
If you google "cragislist buyer scam", "fake paypal email scam", "ebay escrow fraud" or something similar you will find hundreds of posts from victims and near victims of this type of scam.
Check out the one and only official paypal website, read up on what paypal does and how it really works.
From the text of the emails, I know that is not Paypal. They dont say things like that. You are not on the genuine Paypal website. What exactly is your problem? The buyer has a few days to pay you, and his money has to clear, then you can transfer it to your bank.
The rest of your question is nonsense and is not from Paypal.
Yes. It is a scam.
Why would PayPal tell you to send something via Western Union?
Scam, and if you clicked on any links in that email CHANGE YOUR PAYAPAL AND EBAY PASSWORDS IMMEDIATELY
I've been going back and fourth with Paypal about an item i've sold on ebay and me getting funded. I've yet to get funded because of a "temporary offshoot of our ongoing IT infrastructure upgrade" (copied and pasted straight from the email)
So I didn't think anything of it up until today when I got this email.....
We are pleased to inform you that we have made necessary shipment verification and as we were about to get your account credited, we found out that there was a problem with the payment made by the buyer of your item. An excess fund of payment was made into your account which the buyer email us complaining about that and we agreed that you will have to send the sum of US $ 500.00 via western union money transfer to the address given below so that the receiver of the item will use that as the fund for clearance and we can credit your account with the total amount of US $ 1,030.00 You are advise to do this within (12 - 24 hour from now) and get back to us with the senders information given to you at the western union office so that we can credit your account immediately before sending this information to the buyer for security purpose.
I've looked up Western Union Money Transfers... And everyone says its a scam. I've forwarded the email to spoof@paypal.com but am still waiting for a response. What do you think about this? And what would you do?
