The Woes of Selling Online
The term is no longer buyer beware. In this virtual world of selling, sellers beware! Scammers seem to lurk in every online corner.
From my Mary Kay website to a horse sale ad to a saddle on Facebook marketplace, I’ve seen my fair share of scam attempts. With Mary Kay, I’ll often receive texts saying a sister is getting married and they need an insane amount of skincare and perfumes, or they were suddenly struck blind and their former consultant no longer wants to work with them. It’s pretty easy to spot.
My most recent horse sale ad brought an onslaught of people offering to purchase my horse sight unseen. If that’s not a red flag, I don’t know what is!
This week I decided to finally take the plunge and put my saddle for sale. It doesn’t fit my horse, and it’s time to move it so I can use the money to purchase one that does.
The first scam attempt was pretty obvious. The account messaging me was only a day old, and they asked me to confirm a number they sent me to ensure I was legit. (Isn’t it funny they want to make sure I’m the legit one?) It was an attempt at breaking into my google account. The “number” was a Google Voice password reset number. Ummm…no. #BLOCK
A few hours later I logged into Facebook to see a comment on one of my posts, “Hey I sent you a message about your saddle.”
That’s odd, I thought as I dug through all the message folders to find it. The buyer was from Oregon, and I couldn’t help but think – Why didn’t she message me through marketplace & why on earth is she buying my saddle from the complete other side of the country? I mean, it’s a lovely saddle, but it’s a basic storebrand model. Search Circuit Saddle on Facebook Marketplace and you’ll find a plethora of choices. But otherwise, there were no red flags, so I decided to proceed with caution.
Ok, a LOT of caution. I tried my best to go into detective mode. Her Facebook account was over ten years old, so that made me feel a little better, and I googled her email, Facebook name, and everything else associated with her account and nothing came up. I even searched the shipping address on Google maps and found a very normal-looking house. Furthermore, if she really was paying by PayPal, the only scam I could think of would be her disputing the payment to get her money back, and therefore getting a free low-end but decent saddle out of the deal. Not exactly a big money-maker.
We agreed Paypal was the safest and easiest payment method, and she was willing to pay the steep price of shipping. When I sent my initial guestimate of shipping, she sent a photo of a shipping receipt from the last saddle she received to let me know my guestimate was quite low. How honest of her! I thought. Maybe she is legit after all!
I sent her the PayPal money request to cutesaddles@gmail.com and waited to see what would happen next…
A story in screenshots
In case the images are slow loading or you don’t feel like laughing your way through the ridiculousness of those screenshots, she sent me a “confirmation email” from a gmail account. Heads up, large companies like Paypal will NEVER email you from a gmail account. Her email was pretty impressively made and the wording was genius – “once the shipping is confirmed they’ll deposit the money into my account.” Too bad Paypal doesn’t have such a feature to my knowledge.
When I realized she was on a mission to get a free saddle, I sent her a message and asked what she does with all those saddles? She has yet to respond. I still stand by my initial thought – that’s a lot of work for a free not very expensive saddle.
We all know scammers are out there. It’s an unfortunate side effect to this new and convenient virtual world. Remember those days of horse shopping in actual print classified ads? Hopefully, this post will help you feel less alone the next time someone tries to steal your hard-earned money, passwords, or items for sale.
Because my google search turned up nothing on this person, I’m going to drop the information given to me to help the next person in their red-flag research.
Facebook account: Haley Beaner Elizabeth Hopkins
email: cutesaddles@gmail.com
fake paypal email: paypalinstantpaymentalert@gmail.com
shipping address: 486 NE Scott Ave, Gresham, OR, 97030
Have a scam attempt you think the world needs to know about? Can you commiserate with this experience? Let us know in the comments!
The scams are getting worse and leave you wondering what they’re really getting. Clearly the free saddle was only the tip of the iceberg. What else can they learn about you in the course of a legitimate sale and how can they use it for bad? Should we all just stop? What safety steps should we take if post stuff on Facebook Marketplace?
I think that too! Are they getting information from us they can use elsewhere? Hopefully not. I’m leaning towards only in-person selling at this point if I don’t already know the person.
What ridiculousness!! Seriously that is a silly amount of effort to go through, for her! Good gravy….
Yes! You’d think she’d at least target the more expensive saddles.
Yes – anything I have tried to sell online always get scammers. I try to do local pickup …. but even then I have had people say things like—I will pay you but give me your phone number so my cousin can pick it up for me…Anything to get more information.
So weird. I love/hate online sales
She has multiple accounts. I just got a request to purchase my saddle from “Ellen Lynch”, same email address. She asked me to send her a paypal request to cutesaddles@gmail.com. NOPE!
Thanks for posting.
Thanks for commenting! I was hoping to save her future victims some pain. Good luck selling your saddle!
Just had this same scammer try to get my my saddle under the name Sue Griffin. A quick google search of the email address popped this up, although I was familiar with the scam already. It was a good to know not to waste more of my time. Don’t send anything to cutesaddles@gmail.com!
Wow! This lady is hustling! I just bought a saddle and am quietly awaiting shipping notification and hoping I didn’t get scammed on the other end…
I just had the same thing happen, and thought the email address sounded odd, so I googled it too. SO glad this popped up! She reached out under Sue Griffin as well, asked if I could ship the saddle today if she paid (which I thought was pushy). I’m glad my spidey-sense set off and I didn’t send anything.
She set my spidey-sense off too! I couldn’t find anything wrong (until the fake payment email), but I knew it didn’t feel right. So glad you didn’t mail her the saddle!
Thanks for posting. It seemed more legit than typical FB scams but something in my gut was telling me it was off. Sure enough, googled the email and found your blog post proving my gut feeling correct. Situation averted!