It'll be hard to prevent it completely but I think posting some of these hints and tips definitely will help us all be a little more aware. Might be worth people encouraging a waiting period for payment to help with the hacked accounts.
Classifieds Section - Warning/Rules/Disclaimer
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Another thing that might help @modified is make it a requirement to have a picture of the item that is for sale with a hand written paper with the sellers tag, date, and form name.
Makes it a little harder for scammers and many other sites have it as a for sale must.
Makes it a little harder for scammers and many other sites have it as a for sale must.
Thanks guys for the heads up. Ive always used paypal, never quite graduated to venmo or zelle or any of the other more recent pay services.
That is a great thought. I believe that is what many are doing on Reddit classifieds.
For my experience, so far, seems like Zelle & Venmo won’t reverse the transactions. But I opened a case anyway, so we’ll see what happens.
Yeah, did Zelle also. Ignored too many red flags. I’m smarter than this, but for whatever reason, just caught me off guard last night. I sent a request to return the money. On the phone now with B of A to report the fraud. Luckily the financial part doesn’t matter, but I hate liars and cheats. That part pisses me off far worse than the loss of the money. I’ll stick with PayPal and add the 3% so I can be protected in the future.
Interestingly enough, he never messaged me to let me know someone hacked his account. Either way, it’s now been reported as fraud.
Out of curiosity, what was the fake seller trying to sell? By the looks of it, he came on to the forum with multiple different items for sale , and i assume sold the same items to multiple buyers?
Retrax cover, steering wheel, and running boards. Possibly could have sold those items to multiple people as well.
Also headlights.
I received a PM from him this morning that his account was hacked...I was a few keystrokes away from buying the Retrax, even gave the scammer my cell. Looking back, I do find it odd that I asked him to call me and he said he could not BUT he was responding to PM's. Scary stuff...
When I PM'd him about the Retrax, I was well down the list of people who were interested, when I inquired the response was "still available". Who knows how many people he got...
The major red flag for me was that he had it listed as $500 + $100 shipping then later said $600 shipped or picked up local for the Retrax.
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- Staff 🛡️
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As far as I know, 4 members sent money last night. I'm hoping since we caught it right away, everyone will be able to get their money back. Some banks provide really good scam/fraud protection even when a transaction is authorized.
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That price in itself would have gave me serious doubts.
Agreed. I was hoping he had just gotten a deal originally and was trying to flip it quickly. As others have said, I definitely missed red flags but again my previous statement was the big one for me. Luckily, I already had a cover and didn't jump on this one.
Same here, I know you and @Vecman and one other were ahead of me, but I got a PM almost immediately saying the y were still available. The post stated he was in Austin and local pickup was acceptable. But when I told him I could drive to Austin this morning to get them, the local pickup was suddenly off the table. Who in their right mind wouldn't do local pickup for the same price as shipped??? It was at that point I pulled the plug. Sorry for anyone that got swindled and I hope this doesn't drive the legit people away. I have purchased a couple of other items from guys on the forum and everything was as expected.
One thing I am going to do though is become a paying member of this forum so the admins can have some resources to guard against this type of bullshit.
I am a member of several other forums, one of them is a watch forum. What they did to try and prevent scams are as follows:
1. To list an item for sale they have to be a verified seller, they call it a "Pledge Member", in the case here it would be a "Founding Member".
2. New "Members" have to wait 24 hours before they can list an item for sale.
3. "Members" can only list 5 items for sale and they can only "bump" them to the top every 24 hours.
There are many other rules, but these are the ones that allows the forum to do its best to prevent scammers. As you will note, the scammer in this case hacked a member that fit the above criteria. It's hard to prevent, but they have a saying, "buy the seller, not the watch".
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maybe, but I’ve snagged deals like this before, and not knowing the other persons financial situation, I don’t use price as much of a warning flag. I’ve also sold many things for very good deals as well. My mindset is the money is already gone, so I’d someone get a good deal then me recoup losses.
There were far more red flags I should have paid attention to, and didn’t. That was my bad for sure.
