How the heck such a FB account is not banned yet? The author said it was created in 2017.
How I got scammed on Facebook Marketplace (2023)
21–30 of 154 posts
Re: How I got scammed on Facebook Marketplace (2023)
#22When I do FB marketplace I go cash and in-person. It lets you assess the quality of whatever you're buying.
This is the way. Does FB Marketplace even have any sort of reputation system? Or are you banking entirely on the age of the account? I'm a heavy Facebook user, but I avoid FB Marketplace like the plague. Just seems like a great place to get scammed.
I got scammed from a FB advert selling clothing, turned out the company is a scam and sends nothing, FB have allowed them to still advertise for months still.
Re: How I got scammed on Facebook Marketplace (2023)
#23There's a lovely line in the original BitCoin paper which says: > Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers. The word "easily" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there! Escrow is a difficult problem to solve. There is no infallible smart-contract which can protect both buyers and sellers.…
There have been routine escrow mechanisms on bitcoin for 10 years?
Its a very lucrative side business to operate those?
They involve humans, they also involve multisignature accounts and smart contracts just like the white paper inspired or imagined 15 years ago. Its been one of the biggest boons for crypto native commerce, even when automated by the marketplace when the local government doesnt like a website they no longer have been able to seize the funds found in the server because buyer and seller just invalidate the escrow account from the multisig and reconcile money deposited/in transit.
These services are far cheaper than escrow agents I’ve seen on marketplaces that dont involve paypal, far faster than those and paypal, and about comparable in cost to paypal goods and service but mostly cheaper at around 1% instead of 2.89-3.49%. But thats mainly from lack of competition.
Given that paypal offers crypto merchant services, this decade, its far more likely that paypal will get in the crypto escrow game too
and maybe next decade HN collective conscious will catch up to a point that these kinds of comments wont appear in HN threads at all, in favor of people showing us their escrow contract just like they do for their random libraries and products in the rest of the tech space
Re: How I got scammed on Facebook Marketplace (2023)
#24> The next morning, I called PayPal and asked them how the seller could’ve opened a case on my behalf against themselves. They weren’t sure. That's scary :/
I think this is the worst part of the event. PayPal is the most annoying service I use because it asks for 2FA for every damn action. So how could they take that action? Surely if they logged in they left breadcrumbs? The post is mildly infuriating because it doesn’t even try to answer very important that question.
They provide a possible reason, that being mobile number spoofing and calling the call center
Re: How I got scammed on Facebook Marketplace (2023)
#25How the heck such a FB account is not banned yet? The author said it was created in 2017.
FB has many scam adverts that get reported but never taken down, I know as I got scammed from 1 and the company is listed online as a fraudulant company, but FB just dont care as they make advert money.
Re: How I got scammed on Facebook Marketplace (2023)
#26How the heck such a FB account is not banned yet? The author said it was created in 2017.
I wonder if the scammer is using emails and passwords from a breach against Facebook to access "reputable" accounts and then posting marketplace listings.
Re: How I got scammed on Facebook Marketplace (2023)
#27> I paid $1,030 using PayPal Stopped reading right there. I don't know why anyone thinks this kind of transaction will ever work out in their favor. FB Marketplace/Craigslist etc. are fine, but the golden rule is to use them for local, in-person, cash-only exchanges and nothing else.
Bingo. It's about as obvious as the people who are surprised when their car gets broken into and then they tell you that their backpack was visible.
Believe it or not, in most of the USA you can leave a backpack visible in your car and it won't get broken into. It's only some shithole cities where this is a serious problem. So, it's unsurprising that many people would be surprised by that particular type of crime.
Online marketplace scams are prevalent pretty much everywhere because the scammers can use fake accounts and are often in another country.
Re: How I got scammed on Facebook Marketplace (2023)
#28There's a lovely line in the original BitCoin paper which says: > Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers. The word "easily" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there! Escrow is a difficult problem to solve. There is no infallible smart-contract which can protect both buyers and sellers.…
Cryptocurrency is kind of the opposite if escrow. Especially the complex stuff like smart contracts. It is more “technical wizard who hacks it takes all!” with zero recourse.
Re: How I got scammed on Facebook Marketplace (2023)
#29I got scammed for £60 the other day as well when I wanted to buy a Flipper Zero to play around with. I suspected it was a scam, but having never had a bad experience on Facebook Marketplace before (I only bought face to face), I figured I'd give it the benefit of a doubt.
The guy asked me to wire him some money and then disappeared. Once I knew what signs to look for, I realized that all ten people who sold a Flipper Zero on FB were scammers.
Re: How I got scammed on Facebook Marketplace (2023)
#30Interesting story - I wonder how they managed to manipulate the Paypal account of the victim. Clearly Paypal has a problem there. But the other issue is that of general lawlessness and the fact that this scammer will get away with the attempted scamming, and probably do it to other people, too. For every person like the OP who manage, somehow, to protect themselves, there are 1000 others who don't. And there is the i…
The author had a theory: "I’m still not sure how the scammer was able to open and close cases on my behalf. My theory is that they were able to spoof my phone number and call PayPal support and do it over the phone. (They asked early on for my phone number “for the tracking information,” which in retrospect doesn’t make a lot of sense.)"
In my experience, you can log in to Paypal/eBay by supplying your email address, then choosing "another way to sign in" (other than PW), at which point you're prompted to enter a single use code sent thru SMS. So: phone spoofing sounds likely, and it's my guess the scammers were operating without even having to use Paypal support to close the tickets.