Vehicle certification scam currently on Kijiji

Getting Started Buy, Sell, Trust and Safety
1

We posted an advertisement on Kijiji for a camper trailer, and immediately received the following message:

Hi! I’m genuinely interested in your vehicle. I don’t always receive Kijiji notifications, so would you mind emailing me at hskaj1028@gmail.com ? It helps me keep all the details and our conversation in one place. If it’s easier, feel free to send me your email instead and I’ll reach out. Thanks!

When I took our conversation off Kijiji as requested, I received another message on my own e-mail which requested me to get a vehicle report on an unknown website:

Okay, that works for me. Could we meet Wednesday between 3 and 4 pm if possible? I’m very interested in buying it, as my wife loves it and your price is right for me.
Did you get the vehicle inspection/history report from autoreportvault.com ? If so, could you send it to me?
What is your preferred payment method?

The request they made to take our conversation “offline,” PLUS the request to click on a doubtful webpage, AND the willingness to buy sight unseen gave us pause and we did our research. Based on this research, we think that this is a scam aimed at getting folks to reveal their banking data. If Kijiji folk are reading these threads, they may want to shut this user down. We will be blocking them after reporting them to the police and to the federal cybercrime units. We believe that reporting this stuff should be swift and proactive to stop scammers BEFORE they make off with cash.

Kind regards, Jim

2

Thank you for bringing this up to us Jim. I am sorry to hear you were targeted by a malicious user. I can definitely confirm the description is well known scam trend that has been appearing just recently. Thank you for being proactive and providing us the scammer’s email and contact information Jim. This is exactly the information that we need to fully look into the report, investigate the user and most importantly, to prevent these malicious users exposure on the site.

What I can recommend Jim, to avoid receiving scam texts, is to remove the phone number from your posting and just have users contact you through Kijiji Messagings. Scammers tend to mostly target sellers with a contact phone number to avoid using our Kijiji messaging tool, cause they know we do monitor messages to and from users.

Best Regards,

Rob,

Best Regards,

Rob

3

Thank you for the advice. I have removed my phone number as you advised.

James Wilson, Ph.D.
Professor of Economics (Retired)