Automotive Marketing

The most popular scam on craigslist is what I call the Too Much Money Scam. A too much money scammer will email you ready to buy whatever you have listed. He will explain how sure he is that he wants to buy your item, and frequently he will ask you to take down your advertisement and consider the item sold.

The price will never be a problem for a scammer, and he will offer too much or explain that he will send more than enough money to cover the cost of shipping or even ask for a refund on his payment. I published an example email of this scam last year, but the nature and details of the situation the buyer presents are always changing.

The trick to the scam is once money is accepted from this stranger, any transaction made after is the account holder’s choice and your responsibility. The scammer delivers money that does not exist in an attempt to get some of it re-routed or cashed and handed to him or a low life associate.

This week a coworker is selling a dirt bike and the first email he got was a too much money scammer wanting him to take down the craigslist ad because he was going to UPS a check right away.

Another coworker was skeptical when a buyer wanted to send him too much money to cover the cost of a “friend coming to pick up the item.” This specific case was not an automotive sale but a pet prop.

The one signal that remains constant in this scam is too much money.

Have you encountered this scam? Learn how to report an online scam.

The <label> element will not accept a width value in FireFox, and I just spent way too long finding a workaround. The label element is used to associate a text label to a form control that does not automatically have a label.

Short answer: float left makes width work on label elements.

When assigning a width to the label tag, the width value worked in Internet Explorer. FireFox disregarded the width in pixels that I assigned to the label HTML tag in my CSS file.

Label elements are in-line style elements, so technically FireFox is interpreting the CSS properly by not obeying my width declaration. In-line elements do not accept width attributes. The workaround is to force the label element to become a block level element by floating it.

Why float it when you could just declare it a block element with display: block, you ask? Because block elements will stack on top of each other without being floated, and if my original intent was to give a label a width I might be trying to distance it from something beside and not below it. You can do display: block; float: left; and achieve the same result, but if you are going to float it the display attribute is not required.

Google Blogoscoped has a screen shot of a new Google feature that allows users to skip flash intro pages. This is cool because flash intro pages are useless time wasting pieces of crap.

The point of an intro page is to mesmerize website visitors with a flashy cover page so they become impressed with your website and your business. This makes little sense to me because regardless of how fancy your intro page may be, the underlying website still either has what the user wants or it does not. If a website is a piece of crap, it is still a piece of crap with an intro page.

Give users the information they are looking for. There is no need to waste someone’s time when they have given you the opportunity to inform, market and sell them something on your website.