I am more just. frustrated to what these scammers actually get out of these ads. I find it hard to believe many people fall for scams on these big ticket items for the volume of scam ads there are. My thought is they are looking for emails and contact information to sell.
If that boat I listed is not a scam the seller is extremely unreasonable and will likely never sell the boat. I was curious if anyone else happened to contact that seller where it has been listed so long and their experience. If the ad is false I more so feel bad for whoever was originally trying to sell the boat. It seems the scammers are getting more cleaver, you used to see a lot of almost new stuff listed first cheap, now there is a trend to listing sought after desirable items, like used boats, cars, equipment etc.
I used to be a 911 call taker/police dispatcher for the county that I live in and I will say this, scammers aren't in "business" because they don't have any success or because people don't fall for the scams. We would get people calling in multiple times every single day because they fell for a scam and either sent people money or gave the person their SSN, bank account information or some sort of other credit card/financial information. One guy called in saying someone approached him in the parking lot of a Home Depot, gave him a sob story about making a cross country drive from Florida and lost everything along the way except for, go figure, $5k worth of gold. The guy told my caller to give him $5k for the gold, so the caller goes to his bank, withdrawals $5k and gives it to the guy. The exchange is made and as the caller is driving to the local pawn shop to verify that the gold is real, he finally realizes that there was something suspicious about what just happened so he calls 911. He goes to the pawn shop, go figure the gold is fake and he just lost the $5k. I think the 50 ended up finding the guy who sold our caller the fake gold, and I believe he got some of his money back? But I'm not positive.
There's also a ton of scams with people in other countries wanting you to buy them gift cards or deal with crypto currency, or they'll pay you more than what your item is worth to then have you send them the balance in cash or something similar. Other scams involve calling the elderly to tell them their "grandchild" got arrested and is in jail, and they need to pay them X amount of money over the phone or else their "grandchild" will be in jail for the night, or weekend or whatever. As with a good deal of elderly people, their memories aren't what they were before and they can be a bit too trusting of others whom they don't know, and will fall for it all the time. Long story short, scams happen multiple times everyday and continue to happen because they make money off of people.
I replied to a boat ad on Craigslist last year before I bought my boat and it seemed to be a bit lower on the price than normal, so I figured it was likely a scam. I always use a "burner email" or "burner phone number" so that they don't get my actual information if it turns out to be fake and did that with this Craigslist ad. I used an email address that isn't my main one and replied to their ad, then all of a sudden I was getting dozens and dozens of spam email every single day after that when I hadn't before. Every email had links to it that they wanted you to click on, probably so that they could try and track your phone or computer or put some sort of malware or something on it. I'm not too familiar with computers or phones in that regard to tracking and so forth, but I had to end up deleting that email address because I was completely inundated with spam emails dozens of times a day. So yes I agree with you, I think a big part of it is to get your private email address and/or phone number, or as much personal or private information about you that they can in order to sell it off or get some sort of incentive out of it.
There's an app called TextNow that's free to download and they'll give you a free "burner phone number" that isn't linked to you in anyway that I'll use just for instances like this. Or you can always put *67 in front of the phone number that you dial and it'll show up as blocked or restricted, but then if it's a legitimate sale then they might not pick up and in order for them to call you back you'd need to give them a phone number in the voicemail. This is why I generally always prefer to do business with dealers or businesses because it tends to bring the risk level down considerably with regards to the item being a scam or so forth. Obviously, always do your due diligence and have any boat surveyed or inspected, but at least the boat is generally always real and the dealership actually exists, even though a shady dealer/business can and unfortunately oftentimes will list something that doesn't have the accurate condition of the boat in it. Even still, a simple Google search can tell you about the reviews of the dealer or business and at least give you a little bit better peace of mind as opposed to dealing with a private party, especially one that's out of state. I've even seen private party listings on BoatTrader.com where they do the same thing, they'll copy and paste a boat description, save the pictures of a previous boat and then pay to add the listing to BT but will list it for half the price. Then people call up, they'll get their email address/phone number and probably ask for $500 down to hold the boat for them or something and then will get $500 as well as their credit card information.
