Listed Sectional Couch on Craigs list and received an e-mail from "Donald Craig". Said he wanted to look at the furniture, when could he come by. I replied with some information and received the following e-mail:
"Hello there, thanks for writing back.Am so sorry I won't be able to come see it anymore. I thought I was gonna be dropping in your town in the next 2 days but my business appointment there has been postponed to last Friday in December. I'm still very much interested in buying this, I need it for my cousin as a gift for her birthday. Can it still be sold to me? I will mail you a bank official check for the quoted price, any repairs will be on me, bearing the consequences of not seeing before buying and also add funds to cover the shipping to where it will be needed. I will arrange a private shipper to handle the delivery so it doesn't stress you. I'll be very delighted if I can buy this. Let me know if this is something you can work with and you can email me back with your name,address and a phone number for the check. Thanks. "
I then replied with my address and finally received the check on 12/17/09 from a Nia Coleman, who is supposedly his secretary. I tried to call Citibank to see if the check was legitimate, and they refused to verify any information over the phone. I proceeded to deposit the check into my account. My bank did not place a hold on the funds, but I made them aware that I had reservations on the legitimacy of the check.
In the mean time, he would not call me and was very anxious for me to send the "shipper" payment to have the sectional delivered.
Long story short, today is 12/22 and when I called my bank, we verified that it was a fraudulent check and the fraud department is invistigating this matter.