A new scam is circulating on the Internet, and the target this time is sellers who offer their goods on popular advertising platforms or social networks. The girl, who is not the first to sell things in this way, describes to Nova how she almost became a victim, despite the fact that she does not consider herself a gullible person, especially not on the Internet.
Over the past few days, more than a dozen sellers have complained on social networks that they almost became victims of fraud after they advertised that they were selling some goods or services.
One Tiktoker said that she offered her boots on a website for the sale of second-hand clothes and almost “got caught”.
Namely, she was contacted by a girl who was allegedly interested in the wardrobe she was selling. Unlike some already known scams where suspicious messages arrive, usually poorly translated from a foreign language, with grammatical or spelling errors, in this case it was the opposite, he writes. New.
At first, nothing seems like a scam, but the problem arises when the customer offers to arrange the shipment.
QR code – alarm sign
Then the fake buyer sends a QR code that is supposedly on the website of a well-known courier service and asks the seller to scan that code and enter the data from his bank card, in order to fill out the form for sending the shipment.
The same thing happened to the interlocutor Nova, who described how she “narrowly” escaped the fraudsters.
“I was contacted by a woman who had a profile with a large number of positive reviews, and that’s why it didn’t occur to me that it could be a scam. We corresponded, agreed on the price, and when we determined the final price, I received a message to scan the QR code. Then I returned to the beginning of the conversation and realized that the profile from which I was writing was probably hacked and that it was a scam,” said the girl who tried to sell things on a well-known site for selling and buying second-hand clothes.
When, as she says, she threatened the person she was corresponding with to report her, she stopped responding to her messages.
“I spend a lot of time on the Internet, and that’s why I thought I was someone who could recognize such things in the first second. What deceived me in this case was that the conversation flowed quite normally and came from a profile that many users recommended. The crucial thing was that she asked me to send her card number, and not, say, the number of the current account to which she would pay me a new one,” said our interlocutor.
Courier services warned users
Notifications and warnings about these scams appeared on the websites of courier services operating in Serbia. Courier services reminded citizens that they never ask for a card number or personal information via SMS, Viber, WhatsApp or unknown links.
They warn their users not to click on the links they receive, not to enter personal or financial data, and urge them to check the status of the order exclusively through the courier service’s official website.
