A SCAM victim has warned others not to get tricked after losing $570 trying to sell on Facebook marketplace.
The con used a sneaky “authorization code” trick to swindle the money via PayPal.
A Facebook Market scam attacked the PayPal account of this victimCredit: Reddit
A Reddit user has warned others not to fall for the same Facebook Marketplace scam as they did.
Posting to the community r/Scams – they revealed how they were lured out out of $190 three times.
The Redditor was trying to sell some items on Facebook Marketplace when a potential buyer named Hank Smith made an offer.
They requested that Hank pay via PayPal.
“As we were trying to do the payment, he requested a PayPal authorization code which somehow he managed to generate and it was sent to my phone,” the Redditor wrote.
“I provided the code to him like a fool and then got hacked.”
They attached a screenshot of their PayPal account that showed three separate withdrawals to the hacker’s account.
Each was for a total of €176.18 – the equivalent to around $190.
The victim says they have since submitted this information to the FBI‘s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).
Although they were able to recover their funds, they have learned their lesson about verification codes.
To stay safe when sending and receiving money, never give anyone else any verification codes.
What’s more, only the financial institution, in this case PayPal, can generate legitimate codes.
Unfortunately, social media sites like Facebook are awash with scammers looking for victims.
In the case of another scam, victims are watching their bank accounts getting drained just from clicking on a comment.
Often, the comment will contain a link to what looks like a news story, and it may even feature a preview image of a well-known news station.
But the link is actually a malicious link that leads to a computer virus to obtain the victim’s banking information.
A new gift card scam is fleecing victims out of up to $33,000 using a fake online romance.
And a text scam is targeting Amazon customers, with some losing up to $6,000.
