My Facebook profile ought to put scammers off – if you look closely it clearly says I’m a journalist at Express.co.uk and I run a personal finance blog called Broke in Bristol (& beyond). But scammers will go to the ends of the earth to try and scam people out of their hard earned cash, no matter who they are.
I’ve been selling things on the internet for years because it’s a great way to make extra money and as someone who writes about personal finance I like to practise what I preach.
Last year I put my campervan and an iPhone 11 up for sale on eBay and Facebook Marketplace which is when I witnessed first hand the scale of the scamdemic in the UK.
Within the space of a few days, more than ten people tried to scam me for the phone – and four people attempted to scam me over the campervan.
Initially, I’ll admit I was a little amused as I thought to myself “you’re trying to scam the wrong person here”.
But amusement soon turned to annoyance and eventually fear of what some of these people might stoop to, in order to get their hands on goods that are worth hundreds or thousands of pounds.
At one point scammers were offering to send a courier to my doorstep to pick up the keys to my campervan – that’s when the reality that I could be in danger hit home.
I eventually sold both items successfully through eBay and Facebook Marketplace, but I’d like to make sure others know about the PayPal scam.
This is the message I received about my campervan: “Brilliant, I believe…
