Beware of deposit scams on Facebook Marketplace

Moving house is already a stressful time, you don’t need to add getting scammed out of your hard-earned cash to the mix.

Thankfully, in my case, the only thing I lost was valuable time on a wild goose chase for a popular IKEA couch at a price that was indeed too good to be true. Here’s what happened so you can watch out for these red flags yourself.

Like many people moving out with friends my friends, I took to Facebook Marketplace to pick up a few items we weren’t prepared to pay full price for.

Navigating Facebook Marketplace is a nightmare on its own with sellers ghosting you, taking too long to reply or forgetting to take down items they’ve already sold.

We found a couch we liked—the popular Friheten sofa bed from IKEA that retails at full price for around $800. It was all over the Marketplace with people looking to ditch it quickly on the cheap due to a myriad of circumstances.

One seller was offering it for $300, but our availability for pickup didn’t align. Then the next day, after many hours of moving our existing furniture over, my housemate found a listing for $200 a few suburbs away. We were tired, stressed and eager to find something to perch our butts on ASAP.

Mistake number one, never shop on Facebook Marketplace when you’re frazzled. Our interaction with the seller was brief. They had an ordinary profile, we didn’t do a background check or even a cursory social media check. We asked, "is the couch still available?" "Yes." Confirmed the dimensions. Good to go. We let them know we were just sorting our transport and would be ready to head over in the next half hour, confirming that we’d pay $200 cash on pickup.

A few minutes went by and the seller came back asking for a “down payment” to remove the listing because they were receiving other offers. This should’ve been a big red flag. But we were tired and stressed. We had just gotten off the phone with my housemate’s dad who was already on his way with his van.

If not for the fact we’d already paid bond and a holding deposit on our new rental that same week, we might’ve paid up. But, exhausted at the system, we said “screw it” and replied, “We already agreed on $200 cash on pickup, and we’re on our way”. They replied “ok” and the listing was marked as pending. Mistake number two, never ignore someone changing the terms on the fly.

We headed off and arrived at the address. As we reversed into the driveway, I saw a man and woman come to the front door. They looked stressed.

“Hi, what are you here for?” they asked. “The couch,” we replied. “Sorry you’ve been scammed, there’s no couch - you didn’t pay did you?” they responded.

Turns out, we were the fourth group of people to visit them that week for our too-good-to-be-true IKEA couch. One person came from as far as Terrigal (ooft—big waste of time) and one poor schmuck actually made the “down payment”. Only twenty minutes had passed since we last interacted with the seller, but when we went to open the chat to show the couple and add to their growing list of evidence of someone giving out their address as part of a scam, the chat (and the scammer) was gone. Thankfully we hadn’t travelled too far out of our way and hadn’t lost any money.

We were more cautious after that, checking to see if the seller’s profiles had other social media accounts or had at least been on Facebook for a number of years. Fortunately, we did end up getting the same couch for only $150. You really can find a steal on Marketplace—you just have to have your wits about you.