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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;MrNate, post: 3622551, member: 5515&quot;]This is a really interesting post, and I wanted to offer a few additional pieces of advice based on my own experience:</p><p><br /></p><p>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:</p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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..</p><p><br /></p><p>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.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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