SCAM AWARENESS

We had a life-learning experience today that we feel the need to share with everyone. We were involved in a scam. We wish that there was more awareness for scamming and tips on how to know you're being scammed. We had Tyler's old highschool car, Rusty, that we were selling on KSL Classifieds. We had tried to previously to scrap it for money but we were informed that we would only receive 25$ and we knew that Rusty's parts were worth at least a couple hundred dollars. Well, we were losing hope when this lady named "Pamela" had reached out to us and said that she was interested, we were SO excited! She actually even offered more then what we were going to ask for. Now if you know me, i'm a huge worry wart and I always jump to the worst conclusion, where Tyler worries but for the most part, he's pretty laid back. At the very beginning, I was like, "I don't know about this, it might be sketchy.." I concluded that I was probably just worrying too much and why wouldn't someone be interested? As time went on, she seemed more and more legit and logical saying things like "thanks for being an honest buyer", "i'm on a business trip so I need my movers to come pick it up", "i'll send a check in the mail and then you can deposit it and ONCE IT CLEARS, i'll have my movers come". Here we were, naive, we believed every word. We finally received the check and she told us that her movers were scheduled to come the next day (in time before we pick up and move) and that we would need to cash the check and then MONEYGRAM it to the movers. Everything we had heard, we believed so we thought, why not? Makes sense to us, she's on a business trip. We went along and cashed the check, took our part (450$ of 1,450$) and then we moneygrammed the rest to some Dennis guy. We leave WalMart super excited and feeling as if we are just "rolling in the dough". We celebrate and get some food and some drinks from 'Sip It'. We also got one for Ty's mom because she loves 'Sip It', we take it to her at work and we are so excited to tell her our good news. We started to tell her when she just has a worried look on her face and informs us that we've most likely been scammed, she called the phone number and it was a text only number, she looks up the business name where the money was sent from, it doesn't exist, me and Ty both just feel so stupid and scared because Tina also told us that the bank would come after us and we would have to pay back all the money, we were basically out the 950$ that we sent to the "movers". She told us to go back to WalMart and see if we could cancel the moneygram, but it had been over an hour since we sent it and we sent it as 10 minute delivery. We decided to go to WalMart anyways and check. LUCKILY, the money hadn't been picked up on their end so we could reverse the funds and cancel the moneygram. We had all the money back and we had to then go straight to our bank to see how to handle it. Given, we couldn't know 100% that we were being scammed, we all just had very eerie feelings about it. The bank manager was there and we told him everything and he too, said that we had been scammed, "you don't send people money". We were able to give all the money back and cancel the whole check. Supposedly, you can call the bank and verify the check to see if its legit, we tried and they couldn't verify the funds, but also on the website for "Citibank" where the check was sent from, there were lots of posts talking about scammed checks. We texted "Pamela" and told her that we reversed the funds and we weren't actually going to sell the car to her (even though we knew 100% by this time that that's not what she wanted.) She just wanted free money that we would have to pay the bank back later for. She didn't text back, of course.
We were absolutely devastated, we were really looking forward to that money and we are lucky we didn't spend it all and that we were able to cancel the moneygram in time. We've just been thinking all day about how far this whole thing could have gone had we not figured out it was a complete scam. We would've later had to pay back 1,450$ to our bank; money that we DO NOT have, who knows if we could have taken them to court for it, but even than we'd have court fees, etc. 
We didn't NEED the money but I guess we needed the experience and although we are super annoyed and cannot fathom how people can live with themselves when they scam people like this, we are also super grateful for the experience so that we can now spread more awareness about it. 
We are here to tell you that:
1. Scammers may not always seem like scammers.
2. Always meet someone in person before selling something to them.
3. Call and make sure the number is an actual number and make sure that who you're selling it to is legit.
4. DONT BE NAIVE about anything during a sell.
5. DO NOT SEND MONEY TO PEOPLE if you dont know that it's cleared money, have people pay in cash if you can.
6. If you do get a check, deposit it, do not cash it and call the bank to verify the check is valid. 
We wish we had more tips and information on how to avoid scams. But since we don't, we found some websites that do.

http://stories.avvo.com/money/8-signs-youre-being-scammed-on-craigslist.html
http://www.bbb.org/blog/2013/03/10-signs-that-you-may-be-getting-scammed/