“Hello Abraham There is No Problem”: My Wonderfully Horrible Craigslist Scam Saga

When it comes to the Internet, the three most dangerous letters are I, R, and L.

For the uninitiated, “IRL” is a common abbreviation for the phrase, “In Real Life.” As in, “When I play ‘World of Warcraft,’ I’m a seventeenth-level dark wizard in the Guild of Shadows, but IRL, I do data entry at my dad’s law firm.”

There’s a theoretical line between the collective fantasy of cyberspace and the all-too-limited IRL world of injuries and breakable objects. The danger comes when you forget how thin that dividing line is.

Case in point: Last summer, a man I met on the Internet came within a hair’s breadth of stealing $2,317.80 worth of physical dollar bills from me. IRL.

The Item

He said his name was Simon Rice, and I was trying to sell him a dinner table. It was an expensive beauty—pedestal base, black sheen, six matching chairs; the whole bit. An old roommate sold it to me last year by convincing me that it was “an investment in your future—can’t you just imagine your wife and kids sitting down at this thing in your first house?” Not wanting to deprive future Riesmans, I bought it.

Fast-forward a year and I’m moving—shockingly, not into an idyllic bungalow in Scarsdale, but rather, a one-bedroom with my girlfriend. The table was way too big. Cue the solicitations on Craigslist, school listserves, Twitter, Tumblr… Weeks passed. My anxiety swelled. Then came the email from Simon.

“Do you still have the item for sale?” was all it read. He’d seen an ad I put up on a Craigslist knockoff called Backpage. Seconds later, I sent him an enthusiastic, almost wedding-like “I do!”

And thus, we began our strange, garbled courtship. “Hello, Thanks for your prompt responds,” Simon replied. His emails, though intelligible, read like letters from a semi-literate Civil War soldier—words were arbitrarily capitalized as proper nouns, punctuation found itself in odd places, and grammar was a tertiary concern, at best.

“I will need your name and address for payment.As am only able to make payment by cashier check, at this time b/c i am away on assignment.” He concluded with his phone number—an upstate New York area code—and the charming sign-off, “Regards……. Thanks and God bless as I await for your sincere response.”

Yes, I was slightly suspicious. I was also out $500 if I didn’t sell this stupid table. I played along and sent him my mailing address. Might as well see what his next move was, right?

Then came the instructions.

The Instructions

I would receive a check for a large amount of money and tender it for cash. Then I would take $500 of that cash as my payment for the table. The remaining cash was the amount of money it would cost to have the table shipped. I was supposed to send that money via Western Union to a gentleman named “Sunny Liu” in Santa Cruz, California, who would then contact me to set up a time when the movers would arrive to ship it.

When I told my girlfriend about the instructions, her response was—and I believe this is an exact quote—”What the fuck? You’re gonna stop this, right?”

I told her not to worry; that I had it under control. What she didn’t understand—and I don’t blame you for not understanding, because even I didn’t really understand it at the time—was that I knew it looked like a scam. And that’s why I liked it.

Fun With Illegal Transactions

I spend an almost comical amount of time on the Internet, and I had played it safe since I got my first Prodigy screen name at age eight. No opening mysterious email attachments, no sharing passwords, no giving out my real name in the official Spider-Man AOL chatroom. And so on.

So when I encountered Simon’s somewhat-obvious scam, I felt a thrill bordering on the erotic. What if I kept going with this? I thought. What would happen? I had obeyed the rules of the digital world for so long, and it felt cool to transgress a little bit.

So here’s where that dangerous little abbreviation comes in. I’d never get caught in a scam like this, IRL. If I met Simon on a park bench, and he told me to cash a check and send money to a third party in California, I’d never do it.

But this wasn’t happening IRL. It was happening on the Internet.

I was like a longtime CEO asking a phone sex operator to pretend she’s my secretary. If it were real, I’d be breaking my own rules. But in this fantasy world of Internet interactions, I could get all the thrill and hilarity of dealing with a scam artist without any real danger.

A few weeks later, a strange package arrived at my door. The return address was a house in Lehigh, Florida. Inside, there were two slips of paper. One was a handwritten list that simply read, “Alaska 7:15, California, Hawaii, Nevada | Parts of Arizona, Idaho, Oregon, Utah, Washington.” The other slip was a check for $2,850, from “Serco Inc,” and made out to someone named “Abranham Riesman.”

A quick email from Simon confirmed that he had sent it. Into the bank account went the check, only to bounce the next day.

But I really wanted this scammer-scammee game to go on. It had gotten addictive. So I lied to my close friends and myself when I said the check probably bounced because my name had been misspelled. I asked Simon how he wanted to proceed.

A week passed. “Ding,” went my Gmail alert. “Hello Abraham…how are you doing today,i am still buying the item for you,i have made arrangement to get the payment to you so I think very soon you should get the payment.”

Sure enough, another package arrived. Return address? Somewhere in Philadelphia. Contents? A check from “Roger A. King” of Midlothian, Virginia, made out to me, for $2,317.80. Simon told me to do the same Western Union deal, except now I was supposed to send it to an “Anthony Jeffers” of 2852 Rhett Butler Drive in Louisville, Tennessee.

“OK, sounds good,” I wrote to Simon. My willful blindness was nearly orgiastic, at this point.

Then the terms of the deal started to change. “Hello Abraham I dont want you to cash it,when you get to the bank you should ask them to deposit it into your account and send the agent the mony okay…..”

I was confused, and asked what was going on. “Hello Abraham there is no problem I just prefer you deposit it into your account and I am assuring you there is no problem,” he replied.

I did as I was told. Then Simon got frantic. Email after email came, demanding updates.

I told him it looked like Bank of America would let me know about the status of the check the next day.

D-Day arrived. I woke with a sick feeling in my stomach. According to Bank of America online, that fateful $2,317.80 had gone into my account. But that meant it was time to reach into the Internet and grab IRL paper money.

It was as if the phone sex operator had just asked me to come to her apartment.

I chickened out. Sitting on my couch, I sent an email to Simon saying the deal was off. I would mail a check to refund him.

It was then that, to paraphrase the immortal words of Martin Lawrence, shit got real.

Real Shit

My phone rang. Blocked number. My stomach convulsed. “Hello?”

“Yes, hello, Abraham, this is Simon!” I couldn’t place the accent. Caribbean? West African? The tone was unmistakable, though—cordiality and hostility in equal measures. “What is going on? Why do you email me and say this? You go to Western Union and you send the money to Anthony, OK?”

I spoke up for myself. “Simon, the deal is off. You’ve sent me a number of signals that have given me pause. Different mailing addresses, a bounced check…” I listed all the red flags that I had passively catalogued for weeks. I can only imagine that Simon was somewhat shocked—why the fuck was I pointing all this stuff out now?

“Hello, hello, Abraham, can you hear me OK? The money went through, yes, OK?” I told him it had, but that I still wanted out, that it seemed like a scam. For some reason, I felt guilty, accusing him like that. “Why do you say this is a scam? You have the money, yes? You have my money, and we have this way that we were going to do it, and now you say it is a scam? Then why did the check go through?”

After a few minutes of back-and-forth like this, he acquiesced. “OK, OK, Abraham, I don’t like this, but OK the deal is off.” Chest unclenching, I thanked him. “If you want to send the money back, you go to Western Union and just send it all to Anthony and we will leave the table out and it will be done, OK?” I didn’t love the idea of using Western Union, but there was still a chance that it wasn’t a scam, in which case I wanted to make up for being a real jerk to this guy. I just didn’t want the burden of this money anymore.

Cue the climactic odyssey. First stop: a Bank of America teller. “I’d like to withdraw a large amount of money,” I said, for some stupid reason. Minutes later, I walked out of the building with an envelope containing the unwieldy sum of $2,317.80 in large-denomination bills and a series of dimes.

Simon calls as I’m leaving. Blocked number. “What is going on, are you sending the money OK?” “Yes, Simon, I’m—” “Abraham, Abraham, can you hear me OK?” “Yes.” “You need to send the money very soon, OK?”

These little check-up calls started happening every five minutes or so. “Simon!” I said, “I’m in a cab, and it’s all going fine. I have the cash in my hand.” I stopped answering the phone.

And then I was at Western Union in Times Square. I was nearing the finish line. I crept up to a service window and was greeted lackadaisically by a wild-haired teller. He couldn’t have been older than 20.

“How may I help you?” he asked. I told him I wanted to wire some money. “Alright. Do you know the person you’re sending the money to?” Of course, I didn’t, but I figured this was just a cursory question they had to ask for legal reasons. I didn’t want any hassle.

“Yes, of course I do,” I lied.

“Okay. Who is it, and where does the person live?” Oh my god, let’s just get this over with, I thought. “Uhh, it’s my friend Anthony. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky. Wait, I mean, Louisville, Tennessee. Ha ha, sorry, I got a bit mixed up there!”

The teller tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. “Do you really know this person? How much are you sending?”

Caught up in the insanity of the moment, I felt that the proper thing to do was to say nothing and, instead, write out the amount on a piece of nearby scrap paper and slide it under the teller window to show him.

“Yeah, that’s a lot of money to be sending to someone you don’t know,” he said. “You’re probably getting scammed, dude. Let me guess: somebody sent you a check for a lot of money and he wants you to send him something?”

Now was the time to tell him that I was enacting my emergency safety measure, the one that I had kept in the back of my mind since the very beginning of the whole fiasco. “No, no, but that’s where you’re wrong, my friend!” I said with slightly deranged enthusiasm. “I was getting scammed, but I’m in control now, because I’m just sending him all the money back, and the deal is over! I won’t have any dirty money on my hands.”

A pause.

“Dude,” he said. “Don’t you get it? That’s the scam.”

The Scam

“What?”

“That check is gonna bounce.” I tried to stop him and say it had cleared, but he interrupted. “I don’t care what you think has already happened with that check; it’s gonna bounce, man. And you’re gonna have sent all this money to the guy, and he’s just gonna keep it.”

Holy. Fucking. Shit. Time slowed down. All the pieces came together.

I was about to send roughly 25-hundred dollars to someone I didn’t know via Western Union. And I had somehow convinced myself that, given the alternatives, it was the safe thing to do.

“Holy god,” I said to the teller. “Where’s the nearest Bank of America?”

I ran out. Simon called. I didn’t pick up. I rushed into the bank. Turns out that online declarations about checks are preliminary and the check’s status was still up in the air. Nothing had cleared yet. I thought I was going to pass out.

In a daze, I scrambled to the subway. I went topside at my home stop on 72nd street. The phone rang. The moment of truth had arrived.

“Hello, hello, Abraham? What is going on? Have you sent the money, OK?”

“No, Simon,” I fumed. “I just went to the bank and they told me—”

“Hello, hello, Abraham, can you hear me? Why do you go to the bank when you say you already have the cash?”

My pulse raced. I was light-headed with fury. I did my best to explain the situation while I marched up the sidewalk. “Nothing is going to happen until I find out whether the check fully cleared, Simon.”

“Hello, hello, Abraham, can you hear m—”

“Shut up, Simon. Shut up and listen to me very closely. Are you listening to me, Simon? Are you listening, you little shit?”

Standing on the corner of 75th and West End, I was no longer Abe Riesman. I was Jason Bourne. I was in a John Grisham novel. I was motherfucking Samuel L. Jackson.

“Don’t you get it? I HOLD ALL THE CARDS NOW, SIMON! DO YOU UNDERSTAND? BECAUSE I HAVE THE CASH IN MY POCKET, I HOLD ALL THE CARDS NOW.”

I really said all of this, just FYI.

“Now shut the fuck up and just fucking wait for me to contact you.” I hung up.

Minutes later, I got an email from Simon.

Completely Obvious Moral

“Abraham i am a good man that don’t want all this shit,” it began. “i am begging you to please send this money to Anthony today,Anthony called me and was crying on phone,his mother needs to go through a surgery the money i woe him is the money he intends to pay today,try to have human sympathy…Save a life.. you are also Human.”

I can’t exactly explain the feeling I had when I read that email. Sure, it was comical and pathetic. Sure, it was a lie. But all I could feel was a strange disappointment. Up until that point, I still had a shadow of a notion that this thing might have been legitimate, and that my decision to pull out had been an unnecessary safety precaution.

Up until he outed himself in that email, I could still pretend it was a game. But when I read those words, and when I found out the next day that the check had bounced, it meant one thing—not only was my little game over, it had never really existed. Everything had been real, the whole time.

The Internet always looks false; somehow removed from the rest of the world. It’s just words, pictures, and sounds coming from a box. But here’s what we know intellectually and still somehow forget: There is no real line between the Internet and IRL—the words you type are real words. The personality you project online is created by you, a real person.

Like Soylent Green, the Internet is made of people. Sometimes, those people want to pretend to be wizards. Sometimes, they want to have pretend sex with you. Sometimes, they want to rob you. But the Internet is, and always will be, made of IRL people.

Incidentally, I still have a table for sale. About yea wide, black veneer, six chairs. Lemme know.

Abraham Riesman is a writer, campaign strategist, and alumnus of West Suburban Montessori Preschool. This piece originally appeared at Refresh Refresh Refresh #4.

Connections:
The Sakawa Boys: Inside the Bizarre Criminal World of Ghana’s Cyber-Juju Email Scam Gangs
‘I Go Chop Your Dollar’: The Nigerian Music Video about Email Scams