How To Protect Yourself from Forum Scammers

Scammers, beware. These helpful tips represent a best practices approach to safely buying and selling items online through forum classifieds and marketplaces. 

Least shocking news of the day: if you’re online trying to buy or sell anything, scammers are trying to take your money. Here on CorvetteForum, we have a dedicated team of moderators and techs who are playing a constant game of whack-a-mole hoping to root out bots and trolls and all sorts of nefarious persons.

Still, awful people are always evolving their methods, especially when it comes to classifieds and marketplace sales. So the community team and moderators put together this post as a PSA for understanding scammers and how to avoid getting scammed.

The Latest Scams

In online transactions, there are people out there who would take advantage of general politeness and our tendency to believe most others are fair and honest. On the forums, we’ve seen an uptick in three types of scams —

• Pretending to sell items that don’t exist from a newly registered account
• Pretending to be another member who is selling legitimate items
• Phishing/hijacking a member’s account to sell items that don’t exist

In other words, someone will sign up for a forum membership and, once they have enough posts to sell something in the classifieds section, attempt to scam others by “selling” parts that don’t exist. You send them cash via some sort of app, and then they vanish along with the money.

Scammers also like to monitor want-to-buy threads and listings. Remember, if you post your email or phone number directly into a thread, ANYONE can contact you pretending to be the seller. Alternatively, if scammers notice a member who publically posted interest in an item, scammers have reached out via Private Message to the interested party claiming to be the seller using an alternate user ID. In this case, the scammer will quickly provide an email address and a contact number OR ask for yours; the intention is to get folks communicating outside of the forums.

The last variation is a bit like those sketchy phishing emails. These scammers send you a link that tricks you into believing you are logging into the forum and, thus, recording for the scammer your user ID and password. That allows them to log into the forum under your user ID and start selling scam items to people who think the listing must be legitimate because you have tenure and a good reputation on the site.

Lastly, while forum scammers appear to be focusing on smaller items, you should also be extremely careful buying and selling vehicles on forums, online classifieds, and other places like Facebook Marketplace. In addition to all the normal scams — hidden rust, rolled-over odometers, etc. — scammers like to post vehicles that don’t exist, or sell stolen vehicles with swapped VINs or fraudulent titles.

How to Avoid Being Scammed When Using Forum Classified Sections

Here is a list of things to avoid when buying and/or selling in online forums or classifieds —

• Do not share personal information with a user who has little or no posting or selling history on this site.
• If at all possible, inspect items in person. This is especially important for vehicles.
• If you can’t get there in persons, ask if there is another forum user in the area that can inspect them for you. If it’s a vehicle, you should get a pre-purchase inspection and do a VIN/title search.
• Don’t follow links sent by people you don’t know.
• Don’t give anybody your password. There is no legitimate reason for anybody to ask for it.
• Don’t post your email address or phone number in threads. If you do, scammers can harvest the information and bypass the site to contact you directly to avoid sanctions or oversight.
• Be wary of deals that sound too good to be true.
• Ask a lot of questions. Ambiguous answers should raise a red flag.
• Ask for additional pictures of the parts being sold. If the item(s) don’t exist, you won’t get a picture or you’ll get a generic image stolen from the Internet that probably doesn’t match what you need.
• Check references. Who on the Forum has the seller done business with in the past? Did they have a good experience?
• Search the Transactions Feedback section for complaints.
• Do NOT use PayPal’s “friends and family” or any number of anonymous cash apps, all of which lack protection for the buyer and seller. In other words, run if someone insists you pay by money order or some other means that doesn’t allow you to recover your money if you don’t get the item you were trying to purchase.
• DO use PayPal with Purchase Protection and/or a credit card so you’ll have some recourse on a charge-back if a problem arises. (NOTE: we are NOT sponsored by or affiliated with PayPal.)
• Again, exercise extra caution in dealing with newly registered users with no track record.

What To Do If You Encounter or Suspect Someone is a Scammer

Our main advice for dealing with scammers is this: don’t do it alone.

Don’t engage. Don’t troll anyone. It’s best to simply ignore them because it denies them new information they can use to adjust their scams. Second, if you are contacted by someone you believe is suspicious, report it to a moderator/administrator directly.

Image credit: CorvetteForum members, altered with Adobe Photoshop’s generative AI