During this festive period, we all want to give gifts to our loved ones. But we must be more careful than ever, because scams are numerous, and malicious people are taking advantage of the crisis to trap the less attentive.
Catherine McGill, a 53-year-old Scotswoman, can attest to this. And to avoid other people being taken in like her, she decided to tell her misadventure in the British tabloids.
It must be said that the scam suffered by this resident of Glasgow cost him nearly 900 euros. Catherine actually wanted to buy a new smartphone for her 16-year-old son Patrick. When she came across a Samsung S22 Ultra sold for 750 pounds sterling (nearly 900 euros) on Marketplace, Facebook’s sales platform, she thought she had gotten a good deal. Because this Samsung is sold around 1,200 euros in stores…
“I was a little nervous about doing a transaction through Marketplace, but everything is so expensive that I wanted to save money,” she told the Daily Record. But the opposite happened. All the money she had saved during the year was gone when she realized that the smartphone she had just bought was…fake.
The problem is that she didn’t realize it right away. Catherine had however had some fears at the time of the exchange, to the point that she had asked the seller to give her his identity on video. What he had done without flinching. But, a little later, when she tried to contact him again to let him know that she had noticed that it was a fake smartphone, he never answered again. “It ruined our holiday season. I’m heartbroken and can’t stop crying when I think about what happened.”
The DailyRecord carried out their little investigation and managed to get in touch with the alleged seller, who assured that he lived in Southampton, in the south of England, and that he had not been in Glosgow for more than three years.
The police took charge of the case.