Partner almost scammed on Facebook - profile still not removed 31 December 2020 at 12:21AM in Praise, vent & warnings 2 replies 292 views

MrBrindle

Hiya all, I posted this in the Techie section, but maybe here is more appropriate. Apologies for double posting.

I don't know how, but I'd like to pursue this further.

My partner nearly fell victim to a Facebook scam yesterday. She contacted someone who was selling some dog grooming equipment on the marketplace. The 'bloke' became very pushy and dropped the price quite a bit for the sale, he also said 'he couldn't take more pictures' and that he 'didn't know specifics of the items'. He also wanted our address to generate a courier quote, which unfortunately my partner gave him. Please don't give me any scare stories about the address thing because I'm already freaked out enough and angry at her about this! 

He then sent over his bank details and demanded payment on the day. I found this a bit odd as most people use paypal - and we've used paypal succesfully with a few purchases on the marketplace.

Anyway, after it got to this point she told me she was a bit concerned as the persons profile was only created the day before, he has no friends, and his pictures seem completely random.

I check out his profile and googled his bank details, and his 'bank' comes up as 'Wirecard Solutions' which has terrible reviews about it being associated with scammers online.

Bloody great. So I report all his items as scams, and report his profile as being fake, and facebook came back saying 'We reviewed the profile you reported and found that it doesn't go against any of our Community Standards.'  What?!! Someone else will get scammed now probably.

What can I do? Do I message the ******? Tell him I know he's a scammer etc. But then again, my bloody partner sent our address to this person! Do I contact the police?

Thanks for any advice. I'm really annoyed, and a bit freaked out by all this.

Spank

As they haven't scammed you yet you only have your feelings to go on and fb isn't going to ban someone on your feelings.
You can warn people that this person could be dodgy, but going by most posts about fb marketplace here I'd just avoid it altogether.

soolin

It sounds like a very common and obvious scam and one I see several times a day, however as above until a scammer does something then it is your word against theirs. There is nothing wrong in demanding a bank transfer, obviously no buyer with an ounce of common sense would pay that way - but hundreds still do every day. At that point it becomes a scam, until then it is only potentially a scam. 

I post constantly here and on Facebook and other forums about spotting scammers , I have reported to Facebook with the same result as you, I have reported scammers on groups to admin and have been banned from groups for being alarmist or being a scammer myself when I tell people to use a safe method to pay. The usual response is that everyone knows PayPal is scammy, but if you pay by bank transfer then you can just get it back (people honestly believe that). 

We have had 2 big widespread scams locally that actually got into the press, I was warning about both as they happened and was ridiculed. Both were roughly the same, one was for dodgy designer goods the other Michael Kors handbags . The handbag one was more recent, bloke had a consignment of bags arriving, said he took PayPal - his PayPal then had an ‘issue’ and he said he would cancel orders but if people trusted him he would give them a discount if they paid by bank transfer. a rough calculation afterwards when it went bad suggested he had taken thousands from just those who were on this one group. Even after bags were supposed to have arrived he was still taking money, there were people saying ‘where is my bag it’s a week late now’ and others were still falling over themselves to send him money so they didn’t miss out on the bargain of the decade. I couldn’t get that scam closed, the local press I tried notifying weren’t interested until it went wrong and then put up an article about how to spot an obvious scam.