The scammer can’t speak to you by phone or meet up in person. Scammers might insist on talking exclusively by email for any of the following reasons: Insisting on communicating entirely by email They could be planning to send you phishing scams, money or lottery scams, survey scams or even social network scams. A scammer who asks for your real email address might be creating a list of victims they’re targeting to hack their personal information. The scammer intends to send you multiple scam and spam messages. These types of emails typically are cleverly designed to look like they offer a guarantee on your transaction, certify the seller, or inform you that the payment will be securely handled by the third party. Similar to the PayPal scenario above, a scammer (posing as either a buyer or a seller) might ask for your real address so that they can send a fake email that appears to come from an official third party. The scammer claims they use a third-party to securely handle the payment. Once you give your PayPal email address to the scammer, however, they can easily send you a fake PayPal confirmation email to make you think that they paid when they really didn’t. Scammers posing as buyers might try to talk you into accepting online payments, such as those via PayPal. The scammer claims they want to send payment via PayPal. Scammers might ask you for your real email address for any of the following reasons:

Send you fake purchase protection emails that appear to be from Craigslist itself.

Insist on communicating by email only (using either your Craigslist email or your real email).

Ask for your real email address for any reason at all.

Craigslist email scams come in many shapes and forms, but in general, a Craigslist email scammer is known to do at least one of the following things:

Craigslist email extractor online