The Scams That Find You Once You Start Selling

The messages start with the listing

Put one thing up for sale and you will get messages within a day. Some are buyers. Some are not.

The ones that are not tend to be friendly, quick and slightly too easy. They are not trying to trick a careful person over an hour. They are trying to catch a busy one in ninety seconds.

Three shapes cover nearly all of it.

One: they pay you too much

The payment lands. It is more than the price. Then comes the apology, and the ask.

Their assistant made a mistake. Their kid used the phone. The shipping company charged them twice. Could you send the extra back, or send it on to their courier?

This is the oldest one and it still works. Sometimes it is a cheque, sometimes a screenshot of a transfer, sometimes a payment that turns out not to have been theirs.

What they need from you is the same every time. Real money, sent by you, before anyone finds out the first payment was not solid.

So the rule is short. You never send money to a buyer. If a payment was wrong, it gets fixed by the person who sent it and by their bank, not by you sending a new one.

Two: move this money for somebody

This one does not even pretend to be a sale.

Someone offers you a cut for letting money pass through. It might be dressed up as a job, an agent role, or helping out a family friend who cannot use their own account.

Say no, every time, with no exceptions and no curiosity.

You have no idea where that money came from. It lands in an account with an adult's name on it, and their name is on whatever follows. There is no version of this that is a good idea.

Three: get off the app

The buyer wants to pay a different way. Just this once, to save fees.

Read what the payment company itself says about that, in the block below. It tells people not to use it with strangers, and says plainly there is no purchase protection.

That is the whole point of the ask. Inside the app there is a record, a dispute process and a company that can claw money back. Outside it there is nothing but somebody's word.

A real buyer might grumble about fees. A real buyer does not need you outside the app.

The ads are aimed at you too

This is not only strangers in your inbox. Some of it is bought advertising, placed where you will see it.

One example ran on a mainstream news website as a paid placement, under a headline about a fifteen year old making a million dollars from an online store. The offer underneath it was training.

Somebody chose that age on purpose. When you see your own age used as proof that something works, that is not encouragement. That is targeting.

The rules that cover almost all of it

1. Never send money to a buyer. Not a refund by transfer, not a courier fee, not a difference. Refunds go back the same way the payment came in, inside the app.
2. Never move money for somebody else. No cut is worth it, and there is no safe version.
3. Stay on the app. The fees are the price of having somebody to complain to.
4. Ship after the money is settled, not after it appears. Ask the adult on the account to confirm it is really there.
5. Let it be slow. Every one of these needs you to hurry. Waiting a day costs you a sale at worst.
6. Say it out loud at home the same day. Anything odd, anything that felt off. That one habit ends most of this early.

If the sale is happening in person

A stranger buying something in your street is a different risk from a stranger in an app.

Meet in a public place in daylight, and take an adult with you. Police safe exchange spaces are worth using and are exactly what they look like, which is a camera in a car park. Charleston Police Department says its employees cannot act as a witness to transactions. Nobody there is watching your meeting.

Charleston also publishes the shortest useful rule on this: do not invite strangers into your home, and do not go to theirs.

The part worth remembering

None of this means selling things is dangerous. It means the first month has a learning curve that somebody is trying to profit from.

Three rules and you have most of it. Money never goes out from you. Everything stays on the app. Anything strange gets said out loud at home before you reply.