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There are scams wherever you look and for popular companies that deal with the public there will always be scammers. That doesn’t mean you need to be the one being scammed though. You need to know what the scams are and if you use Craigslist, you need to read on to find out some of these scams people are pulling everyday that will probably surprise you.

#1: If you’re job hunting on Craigslist, only send your resume to the postings that have a company name on the posting. There are so many job postings that are fake and spammers use to get your email and phone number to call you once you have sent them your resume. Make sure you look up the company (you should be doing this anyway) before you send anyone your resume too.

#2: All postings about offers to ship cars are scams. I’ve had many people try and give me these sweet deals to buy a car and I will get it for really cheap, I just have to pay for some shipping because the car is overseas. Do not fall for this one.

#3: Deal with people you can meet in person as a general rule. Don’t deal with people overseas or in remote locations.

#4: When you meet someone, meet in a public place during the day. This should be common sense, but I’ve heard of many stories of young ladies meeting a guy to buy something late at night and then getting assaulted.

#5: Do NOT accept cheques, cashier’s cheques or money grams. A common one will be a money wire from Western Union. Do not fall for this one. I was trying to sell a car on Craiglist last year and this guy looked at it and send he wanted to buy it for full price and was going to wire me the money. It did not fly. This is a scam.

#6: Nigerian scams were popular on Craigslist for a while. I don’t hear about them too much anymore, but if you get any emails from Nigeria offering you more than your selling price, move on. Don’t respond.

#7: Never, never give out any personal financial information no matter what.

#8: Make sure you really are on Craigslist. There are some websites, believe it or not, that pretend to be other websites and they capitalize on that website’s success. The real address for Craigslist is craigslist.org

#9: Ticket scams. This is a bad one. If it’s a hot even in your town there will be a lot of postings. A lot of these are for real, but I’ve heard stories of people getting fake tickets.

#10: Report anything that doesn’t sit write. This is what it says on Craigslist: If you suspect that an item posted for sale on craigslist may be part of a scam, please email the details to “abuse@craigslist.org”. Be sure to include the URL (or eight-digit post ID number) in your message.

Remember the saying: If it’s too good to be true, it usually is.