Scam: On Leboncoin, Beware Of This Cruel Scam If You Are A Seller

Be careful when selling items on the right angle † The UFC What to Choose warning this week on a pretty mean scam if you are a seller on the platform. On the famous private sale site, as elsewhere, the consumer protection association warns against interlocutors who are too insistent to continue the site’s secure payment system†

A counter-intuitive approach considering that security guarantees are generally more reliable with platform tools, with one difference…

A scam that can cost you dearly…

To illustrate the fraud, the UFC could take the example of the case of Elie, a young man who almost lost several hundred euros… After the publication of his ad, a high-end computer, Elie is immediately contacted by a potential buyer “ready to pay him both the requested amount and shipping costs,” the UFC reports.

Good news, he told himself. In fact, the man’s proposal to “pay through the platform’s secure payment system” is reassuring. That’s when the scam builds. After several exchanges, the buyer tells Elie that he will receive an email from Le Bon Coin confirming that the money has been sent.

A little later, Elie does indeed receive a message stating that he has received “a payment from the purchasing party” and that his account will be credited once he has passed the tracking information of the package to Leboncoin. As the UFC shows with the photo below.

Amount, reference, seller’s name, receiving address… everything indicates that this is an official Bon Coin email. It’s not.

phishing

Thanks to his flair, Elie still goes to the platform’s site to learn more about the terms of use of the secure payment service. Then he discovered that he should not have received the email in his personal mailbox, but… directly in the Le Bon Coin application†

“An email, no matter how convincing, can be sent by anyone,” the UFC warns. Indeed, by extracting various information from the seller via chat, the dishonest buyer was able to reproduce a very convincing fake email: phishing. If Elie had trusted the email, he would have sent his computer without ever receiving a dime.

“Proof it was a scam, the account was deactivated by Le Bon Coin as soon as Elie reported it. But how many other people have been victimized before?” Association. So be careful not to communicate too much information with the buyer and make sure to always go through the application or the site.