Scam Alert on Classified Ads
 

Beware of a Classified Add Scam contact if you advertise anything for sale. If you are contacted from phone number 973-245-9808 via text or call about buying your item, paying for it using PayPal, and sending a freight company to pick up the item. It is an attempted scam so don’t fall for it. Do a search on the internet for this phone number and you will find all the details of how this scam works to get money from you. Be Aware.

Very common scam used primarily on letgo and craigslist .. Not used as much on nextdoor as they have some method of id verification. TOTV does little in that regard, so not really surprised.. The common"tell" is that the anxious buyer is "out of town" or "in the hospital" so will send a check (pls dont give them your address) and then send someone to pick up your item .. They also rarely try to negotiate the price .. In May, I had three "buyers" with the same line on an item (usually something $1,000 or more).. I then sent them a common email asking if they were all at the same convention ..

This is not to invalidate the importance of the above warning....

Wow, I was lucky! I called a seller on the classifieds last month asking him to hold his item for me as I was several thousand miles away. Hubby got an unexpected vacation and we drove all the way to TV to look at our house (the first time since we bought it) and to see that seller. He gave us his address, and phone number, and waited for us. Even though he had other offers, he waited for us, he was man of his word. And I did say on the phone that price would not be a problem. He was asking a very reasonable price in the first place.

We are very happy, in part to have met this gentleman and his wife and their dog, and with our purchase.

I saw one recently for a 2017 computer - except the brand was discontinued in 2013 and the AMD coprocessor that displayed on the front tag of the tower was basically obsolete by 2010. The ad didn't mention if the tower had been gutted and rebuilt, and that is certainly possible. But a simple google search can teach you a lot about these things, even if you're not normally tech savvy.

I would never buy a used computer. How do you know if it has a virus?

You'd buy it on the condition that the hard drive has been factory reset, or you could swap it out with a new one. You can test it by turning it on, without connecting it to the internet, and running a diagnostic.