What Are Purchasing Scams?

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Purchasing scams (also known as non-delivery purchase scams) work on the basis of offering to sell you something, but then the seller never ships you the goods after you have paid all the money to the scammer for the merchandise. The item being sold during one these scams can be anything. Most purchase scams involve products, pets, and automobiles. They also can involve N95 masks, surgical gloves, surgical masks, face masks, and other forms of PPE equipment related to Covid-19.

Many non-delivery purchasing scams also employ the use of a fake shipping website that the scammer also controls. These fake websites will provide a victim with fake tracking numbers in order to try to convince people that the item really has been shipped out to the scam victim already.

Often, after the item shows as being shipped on the scammer's fake shipping website, then the scammer will contact the victim again and saying that the shipment ran into some problems and that there some additional fees that need to be paid to get delivery of the item moving again. Usually this technique of asking for more money will go on until the victim figures out it is a scam but by then the scammer may have gotten the victim to pay for the item and many additional shipping charges.

The other type of purchasing scam is where you have placed an advertisement online to sell something which belongs to you. In these instances the scammer will offer to buy the item from you, usually at the full price you are offering it at, without trying to negotiate with you on the price, and then they send you some form of fake electronic payment.

Sometimes the fake payment may be a spoofed payment using a fake PayPal email or other times it can involve sending you a fake check, an email from a fake bank, or a fake bank transfer using a fraudulent banking website or possibly even some other form of fake payment website where the scammer asks you to log into to the website in order to prove to you that you have received a payment from the scammer. These fake payment websites can also be used for phishing purposes and result in identity theft.

The purpose behind sending the fake payment is that the scammer makes the victim believe that they have been paid for the item already and then the victim ships the item to the scammer, thus losing both the item and the cost for shipping the item to the scammer at the victim's own expense. In the end the victim never receives any payment and only loses their property to the scammer. Often these scams involve expensive watches, smartphones, and other small, but valuable items which are easy to ship and easy for scammers to quickly resell and turn into immediate cash.

Non-delivery purchase scams are also a type of scam known as Advance-Fee Fraud. Advance-Fee Fraud is best described as an offer of money, merchandise, services, employment, or even romance, but where the victim is asked to pay a fee in advance to obtain whatever is being promised to them by the scammer. The main scam strategy of all advance-fee fraud scams is to try to persuade the victim to send money, and then continue to send more money to the scammer, as many times as possible, until the victim eventually runs out of money and/or goes into debt as a result of losses from the scam. And in the end, the victim never receives any of what is being promised by the scammer.

Please click here to read more about the psychological techniques used to deceive people with Advance-Fee Fraud scams. The following article on Wikipedia also explains more about Advance-Fee Scams in general: Wikipedia Link