How do I successfully reply to a craigslist personal ad?

My roommate put a personal ad on Craigslist to be a personal assistant. A man answered her ad saying that he?

• was moving to the states from England and needed a personal assistant to set up his house and do personal things for him and his wife. My roommate and the man were in contact through e-mail for a few days. He told her that she got the job and would be sending her a check for expenses to set up the house and would send keys for the house in a few days. Now, my roommate has never met this man and has never talked to him on the phone. There was no formal interview of any kind. Today, he sent her a check for $4,000. Is this a total scam?

• Answer:

  100% scam. There is no job, no one moving, no one in England, no house and nothing legit in those emails. There is only a scammer trying to steal your hard-earned money. The next email will be from another of the scammer's fake names and free email addresses pretending to be the "secretary/assistant/accountant" and will demand you cash a large fake check sent on a stolen UPS/FedEx billing account number and send most of the "money" via Western Union or moneygram back to the scammer posing as the "supply company" while you "keep" a small portion. When your bank realizes the check is fake and it bounces, you get the real life job of paying back the bank for the bounced check fees and all the bank's money you sent to an overseas criminal. Western Union and moneygram do not verify anything on the form the sender fills out, not the name, not the street address, not the country, not even the gender of the receiver, it all means absolutely nothing. The clerk will not bother to check ID and will simply hand off your cash to whomever walks in the door with the MTCN# and question/answer. Neither company will tell the sender who picked up the cash, at what store location or even in what country your money walked out the door. Neither company has any kind of refund policy, money sent is money gone forever. When you refuse to send him your cash he will send increasingly nasty and rude emails trying to convince you to go through with his scam. The scammer could also create another fake name and email address like "FBI@ gmail.com", "police_person @hotmail.com" or "investigator @yahoo.com" and send emails telling you the job is legit and you must cash the fake check and send your money to the scammer or you will face legal action. Just ignore, delete and block those email addresses. Although, reading a scammer's attempt at impersonating a law enforcement official can be extremely funny. Now that you have responded to a scammer, you are on his 'potential sucker' list, he will try again to separate you from your cash. He will send you more emails from his other free email addresses using another of his fake names with all kinds of stories of great jobs, lottery winnings, millions in the bank and desperate, lonely, sexy singles. He will sell your email address to all his scamming buddies who will also send you dozens of fake emails all with the exact same goal, you sending them your cash via Western Union or moneygram. You could post up the email address and the emails themselves that the scammer is using, it will help make your post more googlable for other suspicious potential victims to find when looking for information. Do you know how to check the header of a received email? If not, you could google for information. Being able to read the header to determine the geographic location an email originated from will help you weed out the most obvious scams and scammers. Then delete and block that scammer. Don't bother to tell him that you know he is a scammer, it isn't worth your effort. He has one job in life, convincing victims to send him their hard-earned cash. Whenever suspicious or just plain curious, google everything, website addresses, names used, companies mentioned, phone numbers given, all email addresses, even sentences from the emails as you might be unpleasantly surprised at what you find already posted online. You can also post/ask here and every scam-warner-anti-fraud-busting site you can find before taking a chance and losing money to a scammer. 6 "Rules to follow" to avoid most fake jobs: 1) Job asks you to use your personal bank account and/or open a new one. 2) Job asks you to print/mail/cash a check or money order. 3) Job asks you to use Western Union or moneygram in any capacity. 4) Job asks you to accept packages and re-ship them on to anyone. 5) Job asks you to pay visas, travel fees via Western Union or moneygram. 6) Job asks you to sign up for a credit reporting or identity verification site. Avoiding all jobs that mention any of the above listed 'red flags' and you will miss nearly all fake jobs. Only scammers ask you to do any of the above. No. Exceptions. Ever. For any reason. If you google "fake check cashing job", "fraud Western Union scam", "check mule moneygram scam" or something similar you will find hundreds of posts from victims and near-victims of this type of scam.