“Gary, I think I may have been scammed.”
These are words nobody wants to hear, not least when it comes from your partner. It’s also a little embarrassing as a few weeks ago I reported on the most common scams affecting Aussies.
But in that same article, the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) spoke about the shame people feel about being scammed, and how staying silent enables the scammers even further.
So here’s my recent experience. Hopefully it helps a few YourLifeChoices readers hang onto their money.
Beware Facebook sellers with cheap goods
The scam took place on Facebook Marketplace, which is a bit of a hotbed of fraudulent activity at the best of times.
The ACCC’s Scamwatch received over 11,500 reports of classified scams on sites like Marketplace last year, while NAB noted at the back end of last year that buying and selling scams online had jumped by a whopping 78 per cent. Facebook wasn’t named directly, but as one of the biggest classified sites in Australia, it’s also home to a lot of scammers.
In our case, my wife had spotted a complete vintage Lenox Spice Village set for a very cheap price. Given they usually sell upwards of $500 on eBay, this seemed like a bargain.
In retrospect, too much of a bargain.
I was flying interstate for work so didn’t pay too much attention beyond asking “are you sure we can afford it?” and “where would we put it?”
My wife exchanged a few messages with the seller who, as luck would have it, lived a few blocks away. The seller then messaged my wife to say that she’d had a lot of interest and was going to label it as sold, but her preference was to sell it to my wife given how close we lived. However, the seller had also had a lot of time wasters, so she’d reserve it for my wife if she transferred a deposit.
The deposit was sent and after hearing nothing for the next 24 hours, with messages going unanswered, my wife began to smell a rat.
Playing detective
This was one of those classic scams that do an excellent job of seeming legitimate. The low price, the closeness to our house and the request for a deposit all could have been red flags. But they were also plausible. Plus the sense of urgency was a good hook for a payment.
Slightly unusually for a scammer, we paid money to a Commonwealth Bank account as opposed to PayPal or some form of crypto, which would have been a big red flag.
At this stage, we were insured if we’d been scammed. So the first job was to play detective.
I started with the profile of the scammer. There was very little to go on. The profile had been created several years ago but didn’t appear to be very active. There were two pictures: a header photo of the ‘seller’ on a bench with her child and a profile picture of a young family.
My first step was to check if the image was real. AI is not great at replicating fingers and toes but the digits looked real enough. An AI analysis tool agreed with me. There was over an 80 per cent probability that this picture wasn’t AI generated.
My next step was to run a reverse image search for the two photos. This is an incredibly useful way of finding if the photo has been used elsewhere and stolen by the scammer. In this case, both pictures turned up a blank. If the image had been stolen, it wasn’t from a profile that was easily accessible by Google.
I then ran a reverse image search for the Lenox Spice Rack pictures used on Marketplace. Bingo! These turned up a few different sites, including another Marketplace listing in Edinburgh, Scotland. The pictures were identical, the seller’s profile was, like my seller, largely blank, and had only joined Facebook a few months ago – a massive red flag.
But by itself, this didn’t suggest we’d been scammed. It merely suggested that there was a probable Lenox Spice Rack scam targeting Scotland. I reported the profile and listing to Facebook and went back to the seller’s profile to see if I’d missed anything.
This time around, I spotted something unusual. Her profile picture had four likes. All the likes were from men based in Kenya. I spent some time looking through the profiles and they looked like actual people.
Again, there could have been an explanation and it didn’t actually prove anything, but it also didn’t make a lot of sense why a mum from the inner west of Sydney would only have Kenyan men liking her profile picture, but no friends of family commenting or liking a family shot.
Between the suspicious activity on the account and the discovery of what looked like an identical scam, we felt confident that we’d been scammed. It was easy, and simple, and if they’d snatched deposits from other vintage lovers, they’d have easily made several hundreds worth of dollars.
After the scam
We held no hope of getting our money back but still contacted the police. My wife reported the seller as a scam. We also spoke to our bank straight away so they could monitor for any suspicious activity, as well as making an attempt to get our money back. That wasn’t successful. In hindsight I wish I’d also contacted CommBank about the scammer’s account.
I also made several attempts to contact ‘Rebecca’, the seller, through Facebook but didn’t receive any response and was eventually blocked.
This seemed to be a relatively low-level scam, but as well as our money, they also now have our bank details and know what street we live on, so from there it’s relatively easy to work out our address. That’s enough to have a crack at identity fraud.
It’s not the first time we’ve had somebody attempt a scam. Both of us have had phone calls about our credit cards, asking for permission to move over to another card as ours are being discontinued. My dad almost fell victim to a remote access scam.
Ultimately, while some scams are technologically sophisticated, others, like our Facebook scammer, are basic low-level scams that rely on trust and goodwill.
We’ve now learnt a couple of lessons. Firstly, never pay a deposit for second-hand goods. Secondly, if something seems too cheap to be true on a second-hand marketplace, it probably is.
Have you been scammed or had a suspicious interaction on social media? What happened? Let us know in the comments section below.
