Le Bon Coin is the most visited classifieds site in France. This platform for sales between individuals registers nearly 800,000 new ads every day and statistics indicate that it is frequented by one in three French people. The other side of the coin is that Le Bon Coin drains an ever-increasing number of scammers and the people who have been robbed are countless. A few clues will allow you to avoid falling into their nets.
A lot of Le Bon Coin scams are based on a too-good-to-be-true proposition. This type of business is the door open to an unimaginable number of wrongdoings. A salesperson might offer you the latest iPhone for a pittance, or a buyer might offer to buy you a rickety car for the price of a Ferrari. Responding to this type of ad is very risky because their authors are very often scammers who rely on the greed of their interlocutors to better rob them.
This scam is quite common on www.leboncoin.fr. A seller offers a new item in sealed packaging and argues that he cannot unbox the product because it will lose its value once the original packaging is removed. He therefore asks to be paid before the package is opened. He arrives at the meeting with a well-sealed package and slips away discreetly when the buyer tries to unpack the goods.
The buyer ends up either with a defective product or with a ballast. The scammer very often replaces the product with a pebble or a piece of metal of the same weight. In the case of smartphones and PCs, it may be a counterfeit of the original.
In this case, the buyer insists on paying you via PayPal. After a few minutes, you will receive an e-mail with a PayPal header indicating that your account will be credited once the goods have been shipped. It should be remembered that PayPal never sends such e-mails.
A check of the sender’s email address will show an address like [email protected]. PayPal email addresses have the following format: [email protected] or [email protected]. This type of scam used to be easy to spot, but the emails are getting more and more sophisticated.
This classifieds site is quite simply a victim of its immense success. An impressive number of transactions take place there every day. And where money circulates, there are also thieves. Whatever your profile, you are likely to be scammed. This shenanigans concerns both sellers and buyers.
Not visiting this site is not a very good idea, because there are really great opportunities. A first idea would be to avoid too fabulous opportunities. It is also necessary to avoid advertisers who demand to be contacted only by email and those who offer to ship by post. Personal delivery and cash payment should also be preferred.