I ran into a FB marketplace scam the other day: the account was from 2009, so even though I couldn't see any of his info, I assumed it was probably a real person.
He contacted me about a table I had listed for sale, asked how long I'd had it, then told me he was out of town for business but his brother would pick it up later that day, and what was my address? I said I'd send it when I knew when he was on his way, and gave him my approx location instead. That didn't bother him; all seemed well.
Then he said he would pay me online (still makes sense: most FB marketplace sales are cash lately, but if someone else is picking it up for him, this tracks) and asked for my Zell or Paypal (options: also feels legit). I gave him my phone number for Zelle. He said Zelle wanted my email to confirm, since this was his first time sending money to me.
This is weird. To my knowledge, Zelle won't ask for confirmation of someone's identity via email: you can have your phone number and email registered to two separate accounts. I thought this was kinda weird, but not enough that it fazed me, and I went with it.
I got an email "from Zelle" saying he'd tried to send me the amount I requested for the table, but my account limit was too low because it wasn't a business account. I need to get the guy to send me another $400 "to verify".
Weird. Guy says he got a similar error message, and he's had this problem before because his Zelle is a business account. If I call the support number in the email, they can resolve it.
I call. They say yeah, no problem, we just need him to send you $400 so we can verify and raise the limit on your account for this transaction. We know that sounds kinda sketchy to some people, so we're going to call him and explain it to him as well.
While this is happening I'm googling the "Zelle support" phone number from the email, and can't get anything (because all of the phone number verification services at the top of the search results are all paywalled scams themselves). "Zelle support" says they have him on the phone, and the guy DMs me to say he's sending the $400. I get another email "from Zelle".
Finally I google the "Zelle support" email, which is, very suspiciously, an @gmail.com address. This is super weird; why wouldn't Zelle have their own domain name? Finally I get a bunch of results saying yes, this is a scam, and outlining basically this exact scenario and how it works. I hang up, tell the guy that I know it's a scam (and if it isn't, somehow, he can call Zelle support himself- and/or his bank- and get the money sent back), report him to FB, and block him before he can send me anything else.
I share all of this because I'm usually pretty privvy to scams, but this one got super far with me before I finally clocked it. There's a lot of shit people can do to get around common knowledge about how to identify scams, but imo, the best and most reliable way to identify a scam is the one I should have done way before calling that number: googling phone numbers and email addresses.
It doesn't take a lot of time, it's easy to remember to do it for just about any new contact you make with a number or address, and there aren't a lot of ways to fuck it up. We can't learn every single scam that exists, but contact info for real, actual businesses and organizations is a lot harder to fake.
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