Complaint Review: Charles McEntire

 I placed an ad on Craigslist on 1/23/2015 selling a Harley Davidson motorcycle. I received a text the following morning inquiring about the bike. After a couple texts back and forth the individual decided to purchase the bike sight unseen as a birthday present for his son. He stated he was in the military and was away from home at the time. He asked me for my email address so he could send money to my PayPal account. I refused and instead got his and sent him an invoice for the agreed upon price of $15,000. I received another text saying he was having difficulty sending money over Western Union from the military base to pay for a shipper to pick up and deliver the bike.

So he said he included an addition $1540 in the payment to cover a $1400 deliver charge and $140 charge to Western Union for sending the money. I said I would help him out anyway I could. He asked me then (this is all through texting by the way) if I had gotten a payment confirmation from PayPal yet? I had not so he told me I should check my spam folder because the invoice I sent him showed up in his spam folder (which I found out later was a lie). I use Gmail and had several official looking "PayPal" emails in my span folder. There were Gmail security warnings all over the emails (which I ended up with four or five).

The main message in the emails was that PayPal had received a payment from Charles McEntire for $16,450 and I was to immediately send the $1400 by Western Union to an address listed in the email to pay the shipping charges. The message went on to say that PayPal would not release any funds to me until they had proof that I had paid the shipping charges. I was to send them a scanned copy of the invoice. This immediately stunk of fraud. I contacted PayPal and they looked up my invoice and told me they had received NO payments from Charles McEntire on this invoice. They further went on to say they would never withhold payment as the "fake" emails had stated. They don't work that way.

Well McEntire kept contacting me and contacting me telling me I needed to send the money for the shipping charges right away. In the mean time I contacted PayPal security, and the Sheriff's department in the county where he wanted me to send the money. There is now an ongoing investigation though it looks like this individual has been up to this same scheme for sometime and has probably been somewhat successful. Oh and at one point he called me on the phone asking me where the money was. I could barely understand him because he had a very thick oriental accent. I asked him who his commanding officer was and he hung up on me. I eventually sent him a text telling him to leave me alone and never contact me again.