The Facebook marketplace scam everyone needs to know about – after a young mother was nearly victimized while selling garden furniture
- Scam targets Aussies using Facebook Marketplace
- Sellers asked to transfer money to a PayPal account
- The scammer tells them that the money will be returned
Australians looking to sell items on social media have been warned to watch out for scammers posing as fake buyers.
Fake buyers will send the seller a message claiming to be interested in the item and ask them to send their email address.
The seller then receives an email that appears to be from PayPal informing them to send money to a credit account to confirm they are legit.
The seller is told that the money will be returned to their account, but in reality they will not see their money back.
Paige Hinson, 31, almost became an unwitting victim of the scam after she decided to post garden furniture on Facebook Marketplace.
A ‘quick fire’ online scam targets Aussies selling goods through applications like Facebook Marketplace (stock image)
The young mother sold the outdoor table and chairs as her family had just moved into new premises in western Sydney.
She immediately received a message from a middle-aged woman named ‘Rosi’ who seemed quite interested in buying the goods.
After confirming her location, ‘Rosi’ told Ms. Hinson that she would pay via PayPal and that her husband would pick up the patio furniture the next day.
“They were pretty pushy and they wanted to come pick up the furniture the next day, which I was pretty excited about because it was a $700 sale and my husband said that was way too expensive,” she shared news.com.au.
“Rosi” asked Ms. Hinson to transfer $500 to a business PayPal account to confirm she was “legitimate” before it was returned to her account with the $700 for the furniture.
She asked Ms. Hinson for her PayPal full name and email address before telling her that she had received an email from PayPal.
“Hello, can you check your email inbox or junk email folder? I (sic) just got an email from PayPal telling me to make an additional payment to your account to express your limit (sic) and I’m about to do that. I want to know if you will now receive the same email and assure me that I will return the money after you have now received the additional payment,” the message read.
“They asked for an email address, which I gave because I thought you couldn’t possibly get scammed with just an email address,” Ms Hinson said.
Sydney’s mother, Paige Hinson, 31, was targeted by a scammer interested in buying her outdoor furniture (stock image)
A scammer posing as a woman named ‘Rosi’ asked Ms Hinson what her email address was before informing her they had received an email from PayPal
“Then I got a very legitimate-looking email from PayPal with all the details to transfer the money to, so I started with that.”
‘Rosi’ told the mother that sending ‘extra money’ was the ‘only way’, to which Ms Hinson replied that she had ‘never heard of that’.
The scammer sent Ms. Hinson a series of lengthy messages telling her that they had sent an “additional payment” to PayPal and advising her to forward the “refund of the additional payment” so that it was confirmed on both sides.
Ms Hinson was only moments away from transferring the money when she had a ‘gut feeling’ that something wasn’t right and decided to contact her bank, who confirmed she had been targeted by a scammer.
She reflected on how “lucky” she was not to fall for the scam and trusted her instincts to contact the bank.
The young mother is part of a growing number of Aussies being targeted by scammers on social media and online marketplaces such as Facebook Marketplace and Gumtree.
A growing number of Aussies are being targeted by scammers on social media and online marketplaces. Sell Securely estimates that half of all scams come from social media (stock image)
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) estimates that Australians will have lost more than $3 billion to scammers by 2022.
This was an 80 percent increase over what was lost to scammers in 2021.
A national survey found that more than 52 percent of Aussies had been scammed and 66 percent had never reported it.
Online escrow payment service, Sell Securely, believes that the number of people who have fallen victim to online scams far exceeds the figure put forward by the ACCC.
It found that nearly half of all scams to scam people came from social media. Most of these took place on Facebook or the Facebook marketplace.