My Lessons After Being Scammed
Coping with the frustration of losing money
The pain of losing money to a scammer is a painful experience that we don’t get over, the feeling of being deceived in a way that cheated you of your hard earned money or belongings.
Let this article serve as a bit of a warning to you if you’re planning to sell stuff online or are buying something from someone and something doesn’t seem right.
I recently wrote about how I was scammed on Facebook Marketplace. It’s a service I will continue to push people away due to what happened, and even more that Facebook does little to protect buyers and sellers the way Ebay does.
Moreover the whole experience of being scammed has left me feeling defeated. I truly feel stupid that I caved to the pressure of the person trying to buy my old computer, a MacBook Pro 16, which I was selling to pay for some expenses I had built up during the holidays buying gifts for my family and a semester of college.
This person made me feel like I could trust them over the internet. They connected over facebook marketplace and made the claim that they wanted my old computer for their daughter for their upcoming birthday. It was something I felt good about since I enjoy giving my old stuff good new homes.
However this clouded my judgement
I let things slip that should not have slipped my mind. Things that I want to warn you about so you can catch them.
- I allowed them to not put a bid on Facebook to pay
- Forgot to check the PayPal payment before shipping the item
- Caved in shipping the item before making sure the funds would transfer to my account
- I didn’t look at the PayPal email which was a scammed @service.paypal.com which is a fake email
I was willing to trust people on the internet before this, but as time went by with this situation things got weirder.
I got more emails from the fake PayPal email account saying my funds would arrive when I got a business account and needed the seller to send $1050 to me, and then I would send this back to him.
This was when I caught on and something felt wrong
The email’s fine print said to send this money back in “crypto or prepaid gift cards” both of which are untraceable payments.
After confronting the buyer about this, the weird behavior continued. He tried to play that he didn’t have ways to pay. That he wouldn’t download something like Venmo or Google Pay in order to pay me the money I was owed. Instead he wanted money through crypto, something the fake PayPal email had in the fine print.
He also wanted me to buy… STEAM GIFT CARDS for his daughter so she could send the computer back because neither had money to pay for shipping. Yet, a steam gift card would solve this issue… If anyone ever tries to do this to you run the other way because you can only buy video games with steam gift cards.
His final desperate attempt to get money from me was a wire transfer in which he wanted me to send him money after his business sends him money for a contract and I keep my share but send him the rest. I refused. His plan made no sense as he should just get paid and then pay me.
All I feel now is anger and regret. I should have known better than to let this happen to me. Stories like this happen everyday, scammers makes millions of dollars every single year. I felt emotionally detached because it had never happened to me. As someone raised on the internet, I was naive that I could fall for such a thing.
However, after all this I lost my old computer, which should have netted me near $2000 but bought me only suffering. I feel so stupid that I’ve gone through all of this. But this can happen to anyone. It’s not something that just happens to older people, it can happen to you.
I fell into a pit of self-loathing over this whole experience as I started to hate myself. After all that happened I felt like I only lost, that I couldn’t take anything positive for an experience like this. Thinking of how if I “only listened to my instincts” I would have been fine. But it won’t solve the problem.
All I can do is learn from this situation to protect myself in the future and let others know that this stuff happens. You are not dumb if you get scammed. If you lost money like me, you can always make it back.
My final warnings to you are:
- Learn from my mistakes and don’t let them pull a fast one on you.
- Don’t let them pull a fast one over twice.
I want you to learn from my experience and look out for yourself online. Scammers won’t stop anytime soon, so always be prepared and safe guard your information. But if you have been scammed don’t reflect too hard on yourself, do not fall into self-loathing.
