So yet again, I bring you another scam. This time I bring you a unique eCommerce scam. Here’s the run down, this person was attempting to purchase a car off the popular app OfferUp. The seller mentioned that this car had been highly sought after recently and wanted a fee to hold the car for them. But in this specific case, the seller asked for the fee to be in eBay gift cards.
Not the twist you were expecting, right? So nonetheless, this person got $2,000 worth of eBay gift cards and paid the seller. The result was that buyer never ended up getting the car, nor the money back-yet.
This is a new one for even me, I’ve never heard of someone asking for eBay gift cards in payments when scamming someone. For a scammer this is a very intelligent way to trick people. They use a quick and irreversible payment method. Once the gift card is sent to the seller, there is no way to cancel or take back the gift card. Then they use the gift cards to sell them, or purchase things off eBay and sell the products. This is how they make their money with the gift cards.
The buyer then reported the incident to the FBI to see if they could do anything to help her. The buyer gave them their information along with the sellers. After doing some research on the topic of “stolen gift cards”, it states that gift cards are categorized the same as credit cards under law. Law makers call these payment cards “access devices” so hopefully this fraud will be handled with the same scrutiny that credit card fraud is.
I’ll post an update as more details come to light and results come to fruition. Hopefully the buyer ends up getting refunded and the seller gets caught. The final lesson is that if the offer seems skeptical, by any means, it most likely is.
We all must have our guards up and take extra precaution when purchasing things through the online.
