Buying and selling items over Carousell has become a way of life for Singaporeans, but we should still be wary of scams when doing so.
One can become a victim even when they’re selling stuff, as a Singapore woman recently found out.
She put her branded bag on sale only to lose S$9,900 to a scammer.
Thankfully, she managed to get the money back from the bank.
The victim was a 28-year-old nurse named Lu Jiamin (transliterated from Mandarin), reported Shin Min Daily News.
She told the paper that she created a listing on Carousell on 21 June, intending to sell her Louis Vuitton bag.
Source: Shin Min Daily News
Soon, what appeared to be a prospective buyer expressed interest in her bag.
The other party said they wanted to buy a bag for their mother and asked her to send photos of it to an email address.
After that, the ‘buyer’ professed satisfaction and told her they’d sent her the payment via CarouPay.
The payment method is an in-app feature that allows you to pay via PayLah!, credit or debit cards without going through bank transfers.
However, Ms Lu didn’t have this installed and didn’t understand the process.
Nevertheless, she trusted the ‘buyer’ and shortly received an email purportedly from the Carousell Singapore team.
Ms Lu was told to click a link in the email to confirm the deal, and it took her to a website that appeared to be Carousell’s website.
Source: Shin Min Daily News
She now believes that it was a fake website.
Ms Lu was led to log into her Carousell account and key in her bank account info to set up CarouPay.
After she did this, Ms Lu unexpectedly received two transfer notices from her bank.
They told her that S$9,900 had been remitted overseas.
She immediately logged into her bank account and lowered her transfer limit, then told them to freeze her account.
Her quick actions managed to prevent the scammer from making a third transaction.
Finally, she made a police report.
At first, the police told Ms Lu that her money had gone overseas and couldn’t be recovered.
She also learnt that this Carousell scam had been rampant in Malaysia, but started happening in Singapore recently.
This initially made her sad, and she “cried a lot”, she told Shin Min.
However, she received happy news from the bank on 23 June: her money had been recovered and would be fully refunded.
She felt that she had been lucky, and wanted to share her experience as a warning to others.
Carousell has said that the scammer’s account was suspended after an investigation, The Straits Times (ST) reported.
The police told ST that a phishing scam variant, which targets sellers over Carousell and Facebook, has resurged.
At least 84 people were victims of these scams in June alone. They lost at least S$177,000, the police added.
Two victims of a similar scam were reportedly a Singapore couple who lost their savings to a scammer who posed as a buyer on Carousell.
In December 2022, they clicked on a phishing link to receive payment from a purported buyer.
They later discovered that their funds, which they’d been saving for their daughter with special needs, had been remitted to Thailand.
Hopefully, this and Ms Lu’s cases will warn netizens to be more careful when dealing with strangers over Carousell.
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Featured image adapted from Shin Min Daily News and Christin Hume on Unsplash. Photo on the right for illustration purposes only.
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