Call me crazy, but I love getting things for cheap — I’m a thrifter whose first go-to is community buying and selling platforms or thrift stores when I need furniture, decor or anything else that can be on the pricier side.
So when my partner decided to go back to school and needed a new laptop, the first thing we did was crack open Facebook Marketplace. Why spend more than $1,000 on something if we could possibly spend a few hundred? Plenty of people are selling their used computers, especially considering we live among a plethora of higher education institutions and students looking to get rid of their stuff.
Eventually, we found a great deal on a like-new laptop from a programming student, but not before evading a scam attempt.
I spoke with Eva Velasquez, president and CEO of the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center, to get a clear understanding of what went wrong and hopefully help you avoid this very situation.
So if you’re shopping on marketplaces like that of Facebook, keep the following red flags in mind.
It’s too good to be true
I love a little hope and optimism, but when it comes to your money and your safety, it’s much better to be skeptical. Scammers know what you want, and they’ll dangle it in front of you like a carrot to a rabbit.
That’s exactly what happened to me as I was scrolling Facebook Marketplace. What most sellers would list for $700+ was listed for $200.
My partner and I decided to send the seller a message asking about the computer, and she ended up offering an even lower price (I’ll get into that later). The red flags immediately went up so we scoped out her profile. I mean, who would really offer such a good deal on a new, unused MacBook?
However, the account seemed completely legitimate. There was a decade’s worth of posts, family photos, friends, you name it. It seemed way too good to be true, but a scammer wouldn’t have such a legitimate post history, right?
Wrong.
“We have talked to thousands of people who are reaching out to us going, ‘My social media account –Facebook and Instagram are the most popular — has been taken over, and it’s no longer under my control, and now this scammer is reaching out to my network and pretending to be me,'” Velasquez tells Money Talks News. “It’s very common.”
Scammers know how to make a too-good-to-be-true offer seem more legitimate. So, let’s be realistic. You probably wouldn’t be giving away possessions you spent hundreds or even thousands on to complete strangers so what are the odds someone will blithely do that for you? They may look or sound genuine, but that’s just how good scammers are nowadays.
The ‘seller’ manufactures empathy or urgency
Red flags immediately flew to the sky when the seller reduced her price on the laptop, so why did I stick around? Well, I’m a sucker for a sob story, I guess.
The person on the other side of the screen said that her daughter had recently died from a lung disease. At this point, she said she was just desperate to get rid of the things she had no use for and couldn’t bear to keep. That’s why she lowered the price for us even further — she just wanted to get it off her hands.
Ultimately, this wasn’t true. But the empathy it instilled in me was, of course, thought out.
“They’re making it sound like it’s legitimate … You can understand why someone might not be prioritizing money in that circumstance,” Velasquez says. She adds that it has the dual purpose of cutting off more questions. “It stops you from asking for detail because you don’t want to be a bad person. You don’t want to start going into detective mode when someone tells you about a personal tragedy.”
While urgency wasn’t part of this particular experience, it’s certainly a method other scammers may use.
“The scammers are going to try to manipulate you,” according to Velasquez. “A lot of times, they want to play on that sense of either fear or a sense of urgency, and they want to give legitimate sounding reasons,”
I’ve seen it in my email inbox plenty of times, and you probably have too.
“We’re charging your card hundreds of dollars. Provide your details now to cancel!”
“You have past-due payments on your taxes. Login through this link before the IRS penalizes you!”
You get it.
For these reasons, you should never click a link in an email or text or provide your information to a caller you didn’t call first. The IRS will never call, email or text you, and The Geek Squad certainly won’t randomly charge you for random services. (Am I the only one who gets those?)
If you’re ever confronted with claims like the above over the phone, politely hang up and use a search engine to find an official number and call the company directly. If the caller is legitimate, they won’t give you a hard time about this. But the last thing a scammer wants is for you to hang up the phone, and they’ll say whatever they need to in order to stop you.
If you receive an email or text, never click a link. Go to your favorite search engine and pull up their website there instead.
Clicking a link from “USPS” claiming she had a lost package is exactly what lost my grandmother about $800 to scammers — but that’s another story.
The ‘seller’ wants money before giving you the product
My Facebook scammer had their listing advertised for pickup in Philadelphia, where I currently live. So color me shocked when she did the switcheroo and said she was now in Florida and would have to ship it to me.
I’ve certainly mis-clicked a button or two in my life, but setting your location to a completely different state isn’t exactly an easy misstep to make on Facebook Marketplace. This inconsistency sounded another alarm bell.
Sure, they were in Florida, but the scammer said they were happy to ship the laptop to me instead. All I had to do was cover shipping.
Sounds amazing. Sounds too good to be true.
They named the shipping price and asked for it upfront, and while I was too sketched out to confidently proceed with the purchase at this point, we decided to go to the U.S. Postal Service site to calculate the shipping costs from Florida to Philadelphia.
Boy, this scammer did their research. The shipping costs they asked us to cover are exactly what USPS estimated.
Was scamming someone out of 20-some dollars really worth wasting your time on? I wasn’t planning on sending anything after all these red flags, but I was still perplexed by the idea that such a small amount was even worth a scammer’s time.
Velasquez says, “The end goal is always money. It’s always for financial gain. But how they get to that end goal is going to vary because they know that they don’t necessarily have to do one thing.”
You’re smart, but scammers have often been around the block, know what they’re doing, and know how to manipulate their victims.
The ‘seller’ demands certain payment methods
A scammer’s goal is to take your money and keep it. If you have an easy out to report their charge as a scam and get a refund — as is the case with credit card payments — then they’ve wasted their time. That just won’t do.
My scammer asked for payment over Apple Cash. I later learned that’s because it’s a peer-to-peer digital wallet and doesn’t offer buyer protection. If you send any money through the system, it’s gone. Period. There is no way to request a refund or chargeback. This makes it easy for scammers to disappear with your money the second you hit “Send.”
It’s also much easier than getting you to share a card number and PIN, according to Aura, a cybersecurity company.
If you’re going to buy something, pay through the listing app or website instead, not peer-to-peer platforms. That includes PayPal, Venmo and CashApp.
Facebook Marketplace offers ways to buy through them directly. The company’s website explains that you can click “Buy now” instead of messaging a seller about the transaction. Eligible purchases made this way are covered with purchase protection, meaning you’ll actually be able to request a refund if need be.
Of course, this option won’t be a scammer’s first choice, unlike third-party platforms.
There are other similar accounts
The nail in the coffin for my scammer was when my partner found the original owner of the overtaken account.
He put the account owner’s name into the Facebook search bar and found a profile with the same name and a profile that resembled that of the seller. This account was recently made. My partner decided to message this new account and asked if the original was their profile.
It was, according to the user. But it had been hacked, and she wasn’t able to get back in.
She likely never will, based on Identity Theft Research Center data.
“Seventy percent of people said they had to walk away from [their] account. They never got control of it back. They never got it taken down,” Velasquez says. “So that lets you know the sheer number of accounts that are out there that look very legitimate because at one point they belonged to legitimate, real people [but] are now not under their control.”
When buying online through social media, always check to see if there are duplicate or similar accounts.
One way to do that is just by searching their name like we did. However, other scammers may not keep an account’s original name like this one did.
Another method you should certainly try is a reverse image search.
If other accounts pop up with the same photos, regardless of name, the person you’re considering transacting with may be a bad actor.
Here are steps to conduct a reverse image search on Google (it’s probably easier than you think):
- Right click on the image and select “Copy image address.”
- Go to Google.com.
- Click the “Search by image” icon, which resembles a camera.
- In the text box, paste the image link.
- Click “Search.”
If you’re not a fan of Google, Microsoft Bing has an image search option as well.
Not on the market? You’re still at risk
Always add two-factor authentication to your accounts. This not only protects your financial information but your personal identity as well.
If you’re not going to do it for your safety, at least do it to protect the years you’ve put into your social media accounts.
As Velasquez says, once someone takes over account — and you certainly don’t have to be selling anything for that to happen — it’s likely gone forever. Especially on Facebook.
You can make a report online about your account if it’s overtaken, but there is no customer service line.
“I always advise people just don’t waste your time. There’s no phone number. Don’t try to find it. There’s no secret number,” Velasquez urges. “It simply doesn’t exist.”
Do yourself and your loved ones a favor and proactively protect your account instead.
Scammers don’t just use your social media account to go after strangers on online marketplaces. They’ll target your friends too.
“If it’s a revenue-generating account, maybe you have a lot of followers, they will try to insert themselves and capture that revenue,” Velasquez says. “They’re masters of A/B testing, and so they know that different tactics are going to work with different people.”
She explains, for example, that more altruistic people may be hit with charity scams. Accounts that focus on side hustles and making money may be confronted with investment schemes. If the account is active on Facebook Marketplace? Of course, the scammer will cash in.
And some users have a long history of chats with their friends. Scammers will use that to simply message the user’s friends (pretending to be them) and ask the friends for money directly.
If your identity is ever stolen — social media or otherwise — the Identity Theft Resource Center’s services are free. You can chat online or call an advisor from the organization to learn which steps to take next.
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