February 6, 2025
Facebook Marketplace scams are rising, with fraudsters hijacking accounts, sending dodgy e-transfer requests and selling fake goods.
On Sunday afternoon, Matt Machado drove 25 minutes to a house in Scarborough, hoping to meet a middle-aged woman who was selling a second-hand camera on Facebook Marketplace.
The seller had provided an address but insisted repeatedly that Machado pay a $50 deposit before seeing the item. As he approached the location, Machado received a blunt, unsettling message: “Go home. You are so unfortunate.”
Suspicious yet intrigued, he knocked on the door, only to be greeted by a confused homeowner who said she wasn’t selling anything and had no idea her address was being used in the listing.
“At this point, I was more curious than anything, considering I had never seen this exact kind of scam,” he said, explaining why he visited the house.
This was just one of three eerily similar scams Machado encountered that day on Facebook Marketplace, an online hub used by bargain hunters that has become a minefield teeming with cunning scammers in recent years.
Here’s how can you spot these elaborate schemes and best protect yourself.
Rampant scams on the Marketplace
Toronto police received more than 1,700 reports of peer-to-peer market fraud, like the one on Facebook, in 2024, totaling damages of $2.6 million, according to David Coffey, a detective with Toronto police’s financial crime unit.
But this represents only a fraction of the actual amount, which could be 10 to 20 times larger, considering the unreported incidents.
Before the end of the epochal Eras Tour, a large number of Taylor Swift concert ticket scams were reported taking place on Facebook. Two people in Burlington were arrested and charged by Toronto police in the fall for allegedly tricking 28 people to purchase nearly $70,000 worth of fraudulent tickets.
Coffey said Machado’s story is not rare and scammers can use any address to make themselves appear more legitimate while also hiding their identity.
The three people Machado messaged all appeared to be Toronto locals with 50 to 100 photos of themselves on their Facebook profile page.
“Whoever’s setting this up is going through a lot more work than just setting up an account in 30 seconds, and with a made-up name, with a made-up place,” Machado said.
They listed different older cameras — such as the Canon G7 X Mark II and Canon G7 X Mark III — for $300, far less than the $700 to $1,000 that Machado found on other platforms.
While he was skeptical of these too-good-to-be-true prices, he thought to himself that maybe some people weren’t aware how popular these cameras have become recently.
All three sellers immediately sent him an address to check the camera and then asked for a deposit. Machado didn’t send the money but set up a time to meet with one of them. Neither the seller nor the camera was anywhere to be found when he arrived.
“It seems like a higher percentage, more and more every day of postings are fake, which is very frustrating,” Machado said.
What’s the common scam on Marketplace?
When trading on Facebook, people need to “double verify, triple verify that what who you’re conversely communicating with is the actual person,” Coffey warned.
Many of the cases Toronto police encountered in the Taylor Swift concert ticket scams involved Facebook accounts being hijacked. What seemed like a message from an aunt or uncle you haven’t seen in a while, offering you a ticket, was in fact a scammer who had taken over their account, Coffey said.
In other cases, sellers can be robbed when they receive a fake e-transfer link, which appears to be for depositing money but instead drains funds from their bank account, he added.
Or the scammer could overpay you with a cheque and ask you to send the extra money to a third party. The cheque will bounce, and you’ll lose your own money while unknowingly helping them launder stolen funds.
How to protect yourself from marketplace scams?
Coffey said after chatting with someone from the Facebook Marketplace, you should always initiate a phone call, arrange a meeting in person and pay in cash. Parking lots of police stations, shopping malls or other public spaces with surveillance cameras are some safer spaces for meetups.
But sometimes, scammers may even take the risk to trade fraudulent goods in person, Coffey warned.
“One of the biggest ones we’re getting is fake iPhones,” which look real but are Android phones, he said, suggesting people do a careful inspection of the product before handing over the payment.
David Shipley, CEO of Beauceron Security, a Canadian cybersecurity company that provides anti-fraud training, said people should call a friend or family member to go through a deal because the excitement over a proposed deal could cloud their judgment in detecting fraud.
“Listen to your gut. Emotional intelligence is one of the most powerful tools that we have in the old saw that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t true,” he said.
How can Canada better battle with online fraud?
Coffey said police resources are prioritized for fraud cases that involve larger financial losses and are more likely to be resolved.
The Star reported in January that a growing caseload forced the Toronto police to close “a significant number” of cases without investigation last year as Torontonians lost $400 million to fraud.
In 2023, the federal Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre had 400,000 calls for service from Canadians, but they were only staffed to answer 37,000 of them, Shipley added.
Both Shipley and Coffey believe Facebook should take more responsibility to manage fake accounts and help police track down online fraud by cutting red tape.
Shipley argued that online fraud hasn’t received the police attention or funding it deserves. Canada needs more than just a call centre — it requires a unified national police agency with federal-level funding to effectively combat digital fraud.
Without such an agency, helpful tips alone may not be enough to protect vulnerable Canadians from sophisticated scams backed by significant investments of time and technology.
“That’s kind of the equivalent of giving everyone a rifle and ammunition and sending them into the Wild West and saying, ‘Good luck,’ ” Shipley said.
Courtesy of Toronto Star – January 30, 2025
