A scam is spreading on the sales site between individuals and professionals, Leboncoin. The association UFC Que Choisir launches the alert and calls for caution…
Be careful if you sell items on The good corner ! The UFC What To Choose alert this week on a pretty vicious scam when you are a seller on the platform. On the famous site for sale between individuals, as elsewhere, the consumer defense association warns about interlocutors who are too insistent to go through the secure payment system of the site.
A counter-intuitive approach when you know 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 was able to 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 the requested sum as well as the shipping costs”, indicates the UFC.
Good news, he said to himself. The man’s proposal to “pay via the platform’s secure payment system” is even 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 few moments later, Elie indeed receives a message telling him that he has received “a payment from the purchasing party” and that his account will be credited once he has communicated the package tracking information to Leboncoin. . As the UFC shows with the photo below.
The fake email received by Elie.
Amount, reference, seller’s name, receipt address… everything indicates that this is an official Bon Coin email. It is not so.
Phishing
Thanks to his flair, Elie still goes to the platform’s site to find out about the terms of use of the secure payment service. It was then that he discovered that he should have received the email not on his personal mailbox but directly in the Le Bon Coin application.
“An email, however convincing, can be sent by anyone,” warns the UFC. And indeed, by recovering various information from the seller by chat, the dishonest buyer was able to reproduce a very convincing false email: phishing. If Elie had trusted the email, he would have sent his computer without ever receiving a penny.
“Proof that 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 victims of it before?” association. So be careful not to communicate too much information with the buyer and be sure to always go through the application or the site.
Some tips
1 – Always check the origin of the email, Le Bon Coin only uses the following addresses:
- @leboncoin.fr
- @news.leboncoin.fr
- @messagerie.leboncoin.fr
2 – Grammar and spelling errors
3 – The amount of the transaction. Beware of buyers who do not even try to negotiate, or even those who buy more expensive than the price fixed at the start.
4 – The shipping address. If it is a relay point and not the buyer’s address, this is suspicious.