GREENSBORO, N.C. — Most of us want to stay as far away from losing money to a scammer as possible. But TechScout’s Kent Meeker went looking for it.
“For the benefit of the WFMY community, I went through with it to see how this would play out,” said Kent Meeker of TechScout.
It all started with him searching for a guitar on Facebook Marketplace. He buys and sells items there often.
“It was pretty cheap and it was a lot less inexpensive than it should have been. That was my first indication this may be a scam,” said Meeker.
Because of his background, he looked at the page. At first glance, it looked good. The profile was detailed with friends and links and posts that seemed decently recent. Even on the item for sale, it tells buyers to look at the profile.
“They're so good with AI right now, they're using AI to write back in chat scenarios into the friends list that they're duplicating. They're doing all this work to make it look like you can link out to all these pages,” said Meeker.
His big lightbulb moment, was when the seller asked him to stop communicating through messenger and to text instead. Then came the ask to change how payment was made.
“They'll ask about that pretty quick. I don't have PayPal (which is what Facebook Marketplace uses along with their Facebook CheckOut), but I have Cash App. How about you set up a Cash App real quick? Whenever they're prompting you to do things, to conform to their sale, that's not going to go well,” said Meeker.
Many Peer-to-Peer payment apps are tied to your bank account, but the apps don’t work like a bank. Once you send the money, it’s gone. There are no protections for fraud.
Kent sent some of the money. The seller never contacted him again and the profile page was down in a few hours. He says his experiment continues. He'll check back in a month or two to see if the item and the page resurface.