Facebook Marketplace Scam
Within hours of posting my listing on Facebook Marketplace, I was contacted by a “buyer” that ultimately turned out to be a scammer.
The buyer wanted to pay with Zelle, which already raises suspicion because people often use Zelle to steal money. (This is why many people recommend using it only with people you know and trust.) Even so, I decided to continue on with extra caution.
When I finished setting up my Zelle account and I gave them the e-mail address for my account, they offered to send the payment right away. I then got a fake e-mail notification saying the payment couldn’t go through and that the sender would have to send more money in order to upgrade my account to a business account.
This was a scam.
First, that’s not how Zelle business accounts work. You can’t “upgrade” a Zelle account to a business account like this; you need to link it to a business account at your bank.
Second, this is a common pattern known as an overpayment scam. I blocked the scammer soon after I got that first e-mail, but if I let this continue, the scammer would likely have pretended to send more money (with another fake e-mail notification to match) and then ask me to send the “extra” money back. I would then have lost that amount ($200 in this case).
Other people have written about this sort of scam:
