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My dad would 100% start a transaction like this. For bonus points he might even write the X in ALL CAPS.

The problem with that (at least in what I've sold online), is that older/elderly people tend to copy and paste into their messages or type it out verbatim.

Again, maybe that's specific to woodworking tools and supplies, because those people tend to skew older, but I have legit asked 4 or 5 buyers, this year alone, if they were bots because that is literally their first line.

I wonder if there is any causality here and if so, what the chicken and egg is here... Do old people mimic the scammers who text them or did scammers start mimicking old people?

I think I do that, on the off chance that a person might have multiple listings, and my general preference for precision. I probably also figured it'd be easier for them to know what I was referencing if I used the exact same text.

Prominently featuring the exact text of my listing title has, so far, been a 100% perfect match for scams, for craigslist ads. Doesn't quite catch all of them, but the ones that do that have always been attempted scams.