A friend was recently looking for a used iPhone so we decided to browse the local craigslist. After some searching we saw an amazingly good deal (first red flag? :)) that included both an iPhone and iPod Touch from what seemed like a good seller. We decided to follow-up, but it wasn’t until 1am that we sent the contact email. Next day we got the following reply back…

sorry I sold them.. but I ordered them from suppliers I found from WEBSITE_REMOVED .. they have much cheaper prices than amazon.com

sorry again I hope I could have been of some help

kind regards,
steve

Sent from my iPhone.

I have removed the website URL (WEBSITE_REMOVED) because I don’t want to promote it any further 🙂 I was amused by this reply because it was sent around 3am (two hours after our inquiry) and it sounded a bit too much like an advertisement. Also, I get many emails from friends that have iPhones (some of whom have decided to keep that signature!) and that last line didn’t look right. So, I decided to look further into it. The obvious things to check were the email headers to see if they had any signs of an iPhone. Before I looked at the headers for the reply I checked out the headers from a genuine reply. The most obvious sign was the X-Mailer header.

X-Mailer: iPhone Mail (7A400)

Then I looked at this header in the reply from “steve,” and guess what I found.

X-Mailer: Chilkat Software Inc (http://www.chilkatsoft.com)

A quick look at that site and I found out that Chilkat Software makes .NET libraries. Well, that, along with the bogus “Sent from my iPhone.” proves that this is definitely a scam. Another evidence is the peculiar timing of the reply (within 2 hours, at 3 in the morning!), but that can’t be used to prove 🙂 Also, it was the period at the end that isn’t part of the stock “Sent from my XYZ Device” message, subtle but noticeable.

So, stay away from “steve” and the site that “steve” is promoting because that is a scam. A quick search on google also reveals more bad experiences with that site.

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