Fraud risks
Buyer’s fraud
- After you have provided the buyer with your bank card number, under the guise of a money transfer, the scammer may ask you to provide him/her with detailed card data, such as card expiration date, CVV (secret code on the back), SMS passwords. Or another person can call and introduce themselves as a bank or platform employee and ask for the above data “to make a payment”.NEVER GIVE THIS DATA TO ANYONE.
- Taking into account the development of modern technologies, it is not difficult to forge an electronic document. Having agreed on the deal, the buyer can supposedly make a preliminary 100% payment and send you a “confirmation” so that you send the work.
Seller’s fraud
- The most common option for extorting money from you is a request to transfer an advance payment (partial or full) to seller’s bank account. Unfortunately, some buyers agree and send money. Sometimes it happens that honest sellers want to “play it safe” in this way, but most often they are scammers. And as soon as the money gets into the account, the seller disappears and blocks you;
- There is such a way of fraud known as “China magic”. However, this type of fraud has long gone beyond the cheap Chinese marketplaces. The point is that when ordering very cheap goods from unscrupulous sellers, you can get something completely different from what you wanted. In the case of art, the critical aspect may be the size of the work or the materials used. To make sure that the work you see in the photo matches your expectations, check the photos for uniqueness on the Internet and ask the seller to take additional photos with a ruler.BE CAREFUL!