A reader wrote to us via Facebook:
Please cover the subject of mass scams. Today [August 12 – editor’s note] I listed a child’s item for sale on the kup sprzedaj website […]. The lady wrote to me on Messenger that she was interested: she would send an InPost courier for the item and I would receive the money through InPost.
She added:
The InPost website looked very credible; I had to log in to my account, where the money was supposedly to be. It turned out that, during that time, they stole PLN 2,000 from my account.
She also noted:
The same thing happened to our neighbors, only through OLX, and they wrote on WhatsApp; they also lost PLN 2,000. Please warn people so that more do not fall victim to scammers.
Let us recall. Recently, we reported that a 47-year-old man went to the Lubin County Police Headquarters after losing more than PLN 10,000 when he offered hockey skates for sale via the OLX platform. “The victim received a message from a person interested in buying them saying that the order had been placed and that a link to log in to the bank’s website had been sent to his email. The man provided his online banking login details,” reports asp. szt. Sylwia Serafin, press officer of the Lubin County Police Headquarters. “In this way, the criminal carried out four unauthorized money-withdrawal transactions totaling more than PLN 10,000.”
Unfortunately, these are not the only victims of this type of scam.
The officers say:
REMINDER!
Under the pretext of purchasing a given product, criminals send the seller a link via WhatsApp that redirects them to a website deceptively resembling a classified-advertisement portal. The attached link comes with instructions on how to collect money from the supposed buyer. An unsuspecting victim provides the scammers with payment or credit card details or bank-account information.
They add:
Remember! Links sent by scammers are deceptively similar to genuine websites. Every time, we should verify the websites and links we use. We should not open links from strangers and, most importantly, we should never provide our online-banking login details or payment-card information. This way, we can protect ourselves from losing all our savings.