First of all – good news ;). If you are reading this blog we can predict that perhaps you buy and sell your stuff via MoboFree – the best free marketplace in Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe and other countries. And when using MoboFree you can be 100 % sure, that our engineers, our customer support officers and our users made everything to eliminate scam and make buying and selling as safe as possible.
But when speaking about scammers – there is never too much caution. Our team prepared a small list of tips allowing identification of scammers when buying and selling online. Read them, remember them and share them with your family members and people you care about:
1. If an offer sounds too good to be true – it probably is. If you see s classified of the car where price is half of its market level; if you want to sell something and get a call of interested buyer who does not negotiate, does not ask for details – be careful. Those are serious signals of scam.
2. If you want to sell an expensive item – like good phone, computer, etc. – never meet your buyer alone. Have a family member or friend with you. Strength in numbers!
If you must go alone, always suggest a public meeting place (some shopping mall, etc.)
3. Accept only cash. Any other form of payment – such as personal or cashier’s check – could be fraudulent. Don’t trust fairy-tales like “I’ve made online money transfer already, but money is not visible in your account yet for some reason. But I promise – transfer is made”. You can be sure that money is in your account only when you SEE them in your account.
4. Get to know the buyer/seller. Check all info you have. Got a phone number of buyer/seller – Google it! Maybe you will find some info on internet. Got a name and surname – make some research too. And if you are buying/selling via MoboFree.com – checking background is really easy. Check a profile of the user – registration date, photos, common friends, comments of other users. Usually scammers upload only one photo and have no friends because they came to the site not for network building, but for cheating.
5. If seller or buyer is pushing you to close a deal (transfer money, send item) as soon as possible – be cautious. That’s a common strategy of scammers. They’re pushing you to take urgent decisions because in the sense of urgency you have not enough time to evaluate all risks.
6. Avoid “outside” communication. If you are buying or selling via MoboFree.com – negotiate and discuss details only via MoboFree platform (private messages, private chat, etc.). Don’t move your discussion to 2go or any other outside communication tool, except mobile phone conversation. Why? Because MoboFree really cares about your safety. Once we identify scammer, we have a common practice to send warnings to all users who communicated with given scammer via MoboFree. It helps to prevent possible scam deals. And when you move your communication outside MoboFree – we simply don’t know that you are possible victim and can’t warn you.
Scammers are very often pushing to move to outside communication and have tons of arguments like “communication here is inconvenient”, “this site is too slow”.
But you can be sure – if it’s a serious buyer/seller, he won’t mind to communicate with you via your selected platform.
Hope these tips were useful. Have your own tips? Would like to share them with all readers? Send them to us, or write a comment – it will be really interesting to read that!
MOBOFREE is the SAFEST place to BUY...
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