I just got a response from Nicole Rains on a camera I was selling on Craig's List.
Yes, the same "you are blessed in Jesus' name."
She asked for my PayPal ID to ship the camera to her son for his birthday and the ship to address was in Nigeria. She was going to transfer $200 for the camera and $100 for shipping. She said the money was transferred.
I got a fake email from PayPal from an email I didn't recognize, it comes up as
[email protected], but it's really from
[email protected] The email said the transfer was pending me providing my shipping/tracking information.
This would have been the Part 1 of the scam, but I realized this was all fake. I looked at my PayPal account and no money was transferred or even pending. I called them and confirmed.
I wanted to know if my accounts were being phished for information about my identity. My Yahoo account was logged into from another state yesterday morning. I immediately changed my Yahoo password.
Today I got another fake email from Paypal (same bad email address) and a second one that said it was from PayPal and the FBI (still from same bad email address), but this one had a hokey Federal Bureau of Investigation header as well as a PayPal logo and contained all sorts of grammatical errors.
Then I got another email from Nicole herself. I told her I was ending the sale and I knew she was phishing. She asked me to complete the transaction by providing the shipping/tracking number and asked, "What are you going to do? I sent you my money."
She called from an "unknown" number. I must have included my cell in an email when I thought this was a local buyer. She was pretending she was from PayPal and asking me to provide the shipping/tracking number. I told her to cancel the transaction. I knew it was her. She had an African accent and there was a lot of line noise like it was a Skype phone or something. I hung up.
I hope this is the end of this.