Featured Facebook Marketplace - A Word of Warning

Since Ownedbybear alerted us to Facebook Marketplace, I've been an avid visitor.

I have bought about six things now and the sellers have been great and I've been happy with my buys. However, the very first buy turned out to be a scammer. I was green and bought a vase from a seller with virtually no profile. She (or it could have been he) was so helpful and plausible that I fell for the request to pay by Paypal Friends and Family ("I always use that" she said).

Beware there is no recourse at all for you if you use this.

After about ten instant messages during negotiation I sent the payment (only £32) and that was it. Nothing.

At the other end of the scale, I told another seller about this experience and she sent the item and told me to pay her when I got it!

What annoys me about the scam (I know I was stupid and it's my own fault) is that Facebook do nothing about it. I've clicked the report buttons on both the seller and the item but both are still active. I've asked friends to message the seller and she tells them it is available so I don't know how many £32s she is ripping off without being removed. Very frustrating. I'm not looking for my money back - I put it down to experience but I don't want others to be defrauded.

 

What annoys me about the scam (I know I was stupid and it's my own fault) is that Facebook do nothing about it.

Few people realise that anything & everything they put on Facebook, belongs to Facebook. Period. All posts, photos, pages become Facebook property to do with as they like. Furthermore, Facebook has no postal address and can rarely (if ever) be sued by the likes of You & I. Paypal and eBay the same. Thousands & thousands of pending lawsuits against Facebook will never see daylight and they've been pending for years... Both eBay and payPal are on record saying that they wouldn't pay $1 to own Facebook. It is almost unmanageable and beyond any recourse. One only needs an avatar pic & a phoney email address to join, and there are countless scammers all over the world using banks of computers & alias names etc. in order to dupe the unwary and knowing they cannot be found. Entire office blocks in countries like Argentina, India and Nigeria, are used by some of these scammers too. I personally wouldn't go near Falsebook to conduct My business.

 

I don't think I would ever use fb marketplace for anything but local face to face transactions with cash.

 

Indeed. Say what you will about eBay (and the likes of) but at least there's some degree of safety. I favour personal collection myself these days, except of course when buying from overseas. Some of my own clients also prefer to collect from me and save money at the same time due to highly rising courier costs!

 

Ugg! Well hopefully karma catches up with them! If it helps I think most, if not all of us have been there. Thanks for the warning John!

 

Facebook is just a computer program, a large and complex program for sure, but that is all it is.

It has no conscience or ethics, it's just a machine, so don't expect it to be nice or go after aberrations like scammers that are not yet part of it's programming.

 

John has been very unlucky indeed and I've made many other FB admins aware of the person concerned. They're now blocked by us all.

I've bought and sold extensively there for years, without any problems, touch wood. I've mostly used F&F, but I'll caveat that by saying that has often been from people I knew on the several groups I admin. I've used a cheque a couple of times, too - last week, the person sent me the admittedly low value item before she even got the cheque, bless her. For selling, I've offered to take non F&F. Some do, some don't, but if you're selling on one of the Special Interest Groups, there's a lot more trust.

As John has said, check the profile if you don't know the person and if in doubt, don't use F&F.

 

Back at the beginning of the WWW, sometime in the mid 90's, I sold a Loetz Art Nouveau silver-mounted vase to a person in San Francisco - and took payment via personal cheque.
In those heady days of the early adopters, internet-savvy people were very reliable and even though I never took personal cheques from new customers I made an exception as this fellow seemed on the up and up.
I think he told me at the time that he was a California State employee and the cheque was drawn on the State Employees Credit union account -so I said OK.
The payment arrived and I shipped the vase. As the cheque was in US funds, it took about 2 weeks to clear in Canada and eventually it was returned to me with a big red stamp across the face "Account Closed".
I had his email but my requests for an explanation went nowhere - he never replied. I think he first made contact with me through the eBay forums and a few months later he started posting again so I called him out in front of the forum community.

He had some very creative ways of explaining why he hadn't called me, e.g. his jaw was wired closed and he couldn't speak, he fell of his bike and couldn't type and a few other BS stories. He promised to sort it out but he never did and eventually I gave up. Last I heard though, he was still dealing in art glass in the bay area. I wonder what he ever did with my beautiful Loetz vase he stole from me all those years ago.

Maybe I'll google him and see if he's still around?

I still have that dud cheque from almost 25 years ago. It sits in the hall of shame clipboard along with some other bad deals I experienced over the years.

<edit> I just found an old pic of the vase I was ripped off for and my google search just now found he is indeed still in the antique business in California.

 

Here's the old pic of the vase last time I saw it:

 

Wow that's a beauty. So sorry to hear about your loss Blooey. At least mine was only £32

 

Thanks, @John Brassey - the cheque that bounced was for $800 USD ..I wonder how he'd react if I contacted him again, 25 years later through his business ...or left a review ...not good, I'd warrant

 

Wow, both of these stories stink. So sorry!

Blooey, if you still have the check, maybe photocopy it and send it to him at his business (also with a copy of your photo of the vase). You never know...

 

He's got quite a hoity-toity operation these days and I do have the cheque, just had another look at it ...UGH!

 

This is a really interesting post, and I wanted to offer a few additional pieces of advice based on my own experience:

You are absolutely right that there’s fraud risk when buying on marketplace. I absolutely recommend buyers become very familiar with the most common traits of a potential scammer:

Rule #1: if the profile is very recent, proceed with great caution. For a scammer to continue to be successful, they will need a new profile and there’s a critical reason why. It may feel that when you report a scammer, that nothing happened. In reality, the marketplace algorithm will shut down a marketplace account after a number of reports from buyers. This means the scammer will always need to be creating new accounts. When you are looking at an item on marketplace, it will show you when the profile was created. As a general rule, I’m skeptical of any profile created in the last 2-3 years.

Rule #2: you can also look at someone’s profile. A small number of friends may also indicate a scammer, and a lack of content on a profile is another negative clue.

Rule #3: method of payment is the most important factor on whether you will get your money back. Normal PayPal payments (where you pay the fee) is by far the safest method. If a seller asks me to use friends and family, I usually offer to pay more using the normal PayPal payment. For example, if an item costs $20, I can do this math $20 divided by .96= $20.83. So if I send $20.83, after the 4% PayPal fee, the seller gets the full $20. If the seller declines that offer, be very suspicious.

Continued thoughts on payment methods: I believe the Facebook marketplace payment method has the same security, but I haven’t had personal experience using the buyer protection feature. I can say 100% that payments through cashapp and Venmo have zero protection and if you unintentionally pay a scammer using those you aren’t getting your money back. I believe the same is true for Zelle but I’m not 100% certain.

I hope my thoughts above don’t convince buyers to stay away from marketplace but rather to make informed purchasing decisions. If you could see the total amount of my purchases in the last few years on the site your jaw would actually probably drop. I’ve sent payments using just about every method available, and for me it’s always a calculated risk when using something other than PayPal. It all comes down to your individual comfort level of risk and your intuitive sense when “this profile doesn’t seem quite right.” There’s lots of things you can do if you have doubt; my personal favorite is while I’m in discussion of having an item shipped, and the seller prefers something other than PayPal, I like to ask them if I can come have a friend pick up the item later that evening... Remember if they are a scammer using cashapp or Venmo, that doesn’t work for them..

So if you are purchasing a lot of items on marketplace, it’s almost inevitable you will encounter a scammer. The goal is to keep the risk low, while still scoring great purchases with the majority of your finds.

 

Great post. Thanks for that valuable advice.

 

Mr Nate is spot on. I've bought more bits today using F&F but they're not high value and I did me checks.

 

isn't passing bad paper a felony...federal crime..??

 

This sort of scam is rife in the equestrian world.
Small items as described above where the scammer steals photos from eBay etc ,pretends they own the goods, advertises them and ‘sells’ them multiple times.
Unbelievably some people are persuaded to buy a horse unseen and transfer many thousands of pounds to someone else’s bank account. They wait for the horse to be delivered and it never comes. That and advertising a horse and asking for a deposit to hold the horse until the buyer can get to see it. Then they vanish.
When buying goods a useful trick is to ask the seller to take a photo of the item with their name and today’s date on it in the photo. If they can’t then don’t pay.
I normally use PayPal G&S and no good seller will object if you add the fees on. There are online calculators that make it very easy.
I only pay F&F if I really trust someone although I admit I have just done a bank transfer for a small amount of money. I did stalk their profile first and just have to hope it turns up.

 

I have been on eBay for 16 years and used to sell medium to high dollar glass, china, porcelain and pottery. In the past 2 or 3 years I've pulled back and only occasionally sell high dollar items, now. In all those years, I've only had 2 returns. One was my error and the other was a lady who returned some china because her husband was angry that she spent so much money. When buying items, I always use my PayPal business account, unless at auction, no exceptions.
Guess I've been really lucky.