Facebook users have been warned to remain vigilant when selling items on Marketplace amid reports of a new scam that could trick people out of hundreds of pounds' worth of items.
The tactic deployed by fraudsters sees them use a fake banking app in order to convince sellers that they have paid for pricey electrical goods being sold on the platform. Con artists will go so far as to turn up at the seller's house after agreeing to buy an item from them, such as a phone or laptop, and use the dodgy app in front of their victim so they don't suspect they are being scammed until it's too late, The Mirror reports.
One anonymous victim from Merseyside said they had listed their laptop on Facebook Marketplace and believed they had found a legitimate buyer before unwittingly falling for the scam. They told the St Helens Star: "I had communication with this profile which was this girl. It's a profile they'd set up and they posted a message to me saying 'my partner is on the way'.
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"This boy came at around 8.50pm and went to pay with a mobile banking app which at the time I thought was completely legitimate. I had no idea this fake banking app existed. He showed me the transaction. I later found out no money had been transferred and he had blocked me on Facebook."
The scam led to the victim losing out on £450 in total. The National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB) at the City of London Police is investigating the ongoing scams, head of Action Fraud Pauline Smith has confirmed, after another woman was reportedly conned out of £800 for a phone on the same night.
Just last month, Lloyds Bank issued a warning to customers using Facebook Marketplace over a different scam that sees victims conned into paying for items that don't actually exist. The bank explained that people are typically lured in by the promise of cut-price or hard-to-find items, before being asked to send money directly from their account to another account through bank transfer - a payment method that provides little consumer protection.
Analysis from Lloyds found that two thirds of 25 million reported cases of purchase scams originated on the Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram. The bank also found that someone falls victim on Meta-owned platforms every seven minutes.
A spokesperson for Meta, which owns both Facebook and Instagram, said: "This is an industry-wide issue and scammers are using increasingly sophisticated methods to defraud people in a range of ways including email, SMS and offline.
"We don’t want anyone to fall victim to these criminals which is why our platforms have systems to block scams, financial services advertisers now have to be FCA authorised and we run consumer awareness campaigns on how to spot fraudulent behaviour. People can also report this content in a few simple clicks and we work with the police to support their investigations."
