Whenever I’ve received an email from a scam artist asking me for my bank details in exchange for lots of money I’ve always wondered who on Earth would fall for these stupid offers. Well last week I nearly fell for one through Ebay.

I don’t use Ebay very often, but I wanted to sell my rarely used PSP-Go. Other sellers were receiving bids of £100 for theirs so I figured I may as well sell mine. I started the bidding at £50 and set the ‘buy it now’ to a slightly steep £140. I didn’t think anybody would go that high but then again there are people out there who do spend over the odds. The next morning before work I was very pleased to find that somebody had indeed payed the full £140, and i rubbed my hands in glee.

The buyer was a lady called Anna based in North London. She gave me her email address as she wanted me to send her a few photos to prove the PSP was in good condition. Fair enough I thought, but seeing as I was running late for work I quickly sent her a reply thanking her for the bid and that I’d send her the pictures in the evening.

A couple of hours later I received an email from PayPal, stating that £180 had been sent to me, which would go to my account when I sent her the tracking number for the package. How strange I thought, why is she giving me an extra £40? I was about to send her a £40 refund before she sent me another email, explaining that she urgently needed the PSP to be sent to Nigeria, so the extra money was to cover the extra postage cost.

As soon as she mentioned Nigeria the alarm bells were going through my head, but then again I thought I was just being racist. She said due to the urgency that I shouldn’t worry about the pictures, and that I should send it out ASAP.

The thing is I didn’t take the package with me to work so there was no chance I could send it out that day, but I didn’t want to tell her that as she may have demanded a refund, so I told her I’d sent it anyway. A parcel sent to Nigeria would have taken at least a week to arrive, so an extra day wouldn’t hurt.

She asked for a tracking number, so I requested one from the postroom guys in my office, and told them I would send it to Nigeria the next day.

They laughed when I mentioned Nigeria, as they were sure the package would get lost before it got to its destination. They also said there may be a few charges from customs. I warned Anna about the chances of the delivery going missing, but she insisted I go ahead with the despatch, and asked again for the tracking number, which I finally sent to her.

I still felt uneasy about the whole thing, not only about sending it all the way to Nigeria, but because I presumed Anna was just an old lady who knew nothing about technology. My PSP-GO had no games on it, and you could only buy games online through a credit card. A little Nigerian boy was going to wake up on his birthday and find a PSP with no games, and I didn’t feel too good about that. It made me feel a bit dirty on the inside, like a dodgy car-dealer selling a vehicle with no brakes to a nice family.

The next morning I get ready to take my PSP to work, all packed up and ready to give to the postroom. I even got my girlfriend to gift-wrap it just to be extra nice to the little Nigerian boy. However I was still feeling uneasy about this whole transaction, so before work I logged into PayPal on my PC to check the money was there, but it wasn’t. My PayPal account was empty, just like it was before the transaction.

I then logged into Ebay, and noticed I hadn’t change the status on the order to ‘despatched’. Maybe that’s why the money hadn’t gone through? I changed it but PayPal still had no mention of my money.

I thought back to the email I got from PayPal, and logged into my Hotmail account to find no such email. Where had it gone? I searched for all my PayPal emails and the last one I received was months ago.

I had to get going to work so I took the package with me anyway, just incase there was a slight mixup, but I now had doubts all in my mind. Whilst driving to work I kept trying to work out why I could see the PayPal email on my phone and not my pc.

Then it hit me in the head, and I felt incredibly stupid. You see, I have 2 email accounts, a Hotmail and a Gmail one. My iPhone merges all my emails into one list and I never check which account my emails go into.

I went into my Gmail account and found the PayPal messages on there, which was funny because PayPal don’t have my Gmail address. But Anna does have my Gmail address, after I replied to her message about the photos.

I drew a big sigh of relief, I was so close to sending out the PSP. If I had it on me the previous day I would have sent it out, and I would have felt incredibly gutted.

I forwarded the fake emails onto PayPal and Ebay, in the hope that one day these scammers could be flushed away.

Even though I decided not to reply to ‘Anna’s’ emails anymore, she was still sending me mail. First of all she wanted me to pay customs charges for the parcel, even though I never sent it out.

Also Ebay finally sent me a message confirming Anna was a fake, and confirmed they had removed her. However a day later I then recieved another email, but this was from the fake Ebay, telling me she had been reinstated and that I should proceed with the transaction. No thankyou.

I guess the lesson I’ve learnt is that if a transaction becomes too complicated then just let it go. If you ever get involved in a transaction and the word ‘Nigeria’ pops up, just cancel it straight away. It’s really just not worth the hassle.

(By the way I just sold my PSP to a real person, and even though I got alot less than £180 I’m just grateful that I didn’t have any further dealings with any dodgy folk!)