Sounds Strange to me?

[Rhapsody-NS27]

You mention selling on this site, you mean CF?
If that's how they initially sent you a message, then you could report the username to admin.


I'm active duty Army right now. Aside from the obvious scam of the message, interesting they tried identifying themselves as being at a military base, while deployed. I've been deployed myself where an incident would occur that would cause outside communications to be shut down for a while, but usually didn't last long. an E3 isn't going to be making much money to try buying a boat, let alone one at 41'.


Just makes it sound like there's some sort of hardship when it comes to communicating or paying. While the person tries, he fails badly.


In my earliest deployments, contact with the outside world was very limited, but we've now been established in many places long enough that communications are fairly reliable. So for a legitimate buyer, coordinating a funds transfer of any type wouldn't be too difficult.

[reed1v]

"In my earliest deployments, contact with the outside world was very limited, but we've now been established in many places long enough that communications are fairly reliable. So for a legitimate buyer, coordinating a funds transfer of any type wouldn't be too difficult."

Even back in the 60s, uniform military could always use the old US Army Signal Corps phone system regardless where you were in the world, location classified or not. Today its a snap.
__________________

[Cadence]

It is like any other scam. They only need to have a small % that take the bait.

[coastalexplorer]

Apart from all the other comments made thus far. Just look at the grammar, Scam artists in other countries who are not conversant with the English language, and even more appropriately Have no knowledge of how we normally speak and communicate: Tend to put extreme amounts of detail into the text, even to the point of repeating them selves. So this smacks of west Africa, Holland, or Russia. If not any of these: then one of the other locations that are famous for scams. How this scam is intended to work is not clear.

[hellosailor]

I'd guess that if you call PayPal security and discuss this, they will have some idea of how the scam has been done before, or is being set up this time. Cybercrime agencies, heck, even the US Secret Service (wrt counterfeiting), the FBI...they are all incredibly happy to spend time discussing scams with anyone who suspects one is being run.


They often can't stop or prosecute them-but they're quite happy to put the word out about what may be going on, in order to help prevent it.


The bad guys aren't just clever, they are full time pros, working long hard hours seven days a week to perfect new scams.

[denverd0n]

Originally Posted by Cadence

It is like any other scam. They only need to have a small % that take the bait.

Which is why they don't really go to much effort to hide the fact that it is a scam. Indeed, they actually WANT it to be kind of obvious that it is a scam. That way only the most gullible people will respond to them, and they won't waste their time on the overwhelming majority who will eventually get wise.

[reed1v]

Originally Posted by denverd0n

Which is why they don't really go to much effort to hide the fact that it is a scam. Indeed, they actually WANT it to be kind of obvious that it is a scam. That way only the most gullible people will respond to them, and they won't waste their time on the overwhelming majority who will eventually get wise.

The OP by now probably is convinced it's a scam from Ohio. But if he wants it bad enough, he will convince himself it's real and is that one in a million deal. Kind of like what politicians do to lure people to vote for them.