Club Homepage Forums Classified Ads Buy & Sell - Airplanes Only Airplane Buyer Scam - Feb 2024

If it sounds too good to be true ,it’s usually not. When buying or selling a plane it’s wise to you an escrow service.

My wife occasionally asks me if an email is legit. I simply look carefully at the sender’s email address at first. That eliminates most of the guessing immediately. Then I dissect the email and look for urgency, misspelling, and other tells..People will not stop scamming because there will always be someone who falls for it!

I don't think it really works that way. The big guys are smart and don't get caught.........only the dumb criminals get caught......


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and the rest just become politicians LOL

Within the last month, there's been a rash of fake social security scams the elderly around here are falling for - it's tragic as once their life saving is gone, it's gone for good...I am constantly warning my folks in their late-80's to PLEASE not respond to anything without consultation. Culturally, they are from a different era and are more susceptible to this time of malfeasance.

We have 7 nursing homes and retirement centers in our small town of 16,500 - people tend to "warehouse" their relatives here as the cost of care is substantially less expensive than NY, NJ, MD or DE, so they gently "dump" relatives here, promise to visit and then never do. Carlisle is becoming "God's Waiting Room."

The criminals keep getting smarter - I don't want to 7700 this thread, but recently a scammer got into my friend's USAA account and changed all his personal security questions, passwords and codes so that after the criminal scammed money, the REAL owner could not get into the account to shut it down, and even CALLING was nearly futile. He finally worked it out but had to miss several DAYS of work to stay home and work through it with their top security people. It was a complex phishing attack...that is troubling for regular people like me.

In the last week, I have had two RANSOMEWARE threats that said they broke into my home computer system and filmed "....my family doing things and I better pay up." I knew it was BS and blocked the sender, but I could see how folks with "wired houses" and computers with cameras everywhere might fall for this scam. If they weren't successful, they would not be doing it.

Having worked with computers my entire career, I don't want to store anything "in the clouds" if I have a choice. Everything (photos. documents, passwords, etc) are stored on my computers and each requires a password at power-up.

And backed up I'm sure.

Yes, backed up incrementally every 3 months to a USB stick, and full backups every 6 months to external portable hard drives.

I’m trying to sell my first airplane and avoid scams. Does anyone have experience/recommendations on how to accept payment (especially from an out of state buyer) without giving sensitive personal information, or risk fraudulent transactions?

Use an escrow service.
I think AOPA might help if you happen to be a member.