I've been looking on Facebook Marketplace for a couple of things I wanted recently. Yesterday I was surprised when I saw a load of listings for one the items I was looking at, all with the same photos but for sale in different locations and by different sellers. There were 3 different listings they had copied and then added multiple copies of each.
This screenshot is actually from today, and there are only a couple of obvious scam items on it
I thought this was quite a weird scam since Facebook marketplace is for face to face sales, and wondered how these scams would work. Well, today I received a reply to a message regarding a listing I had enquired about a week and a half ago. This was before I had seen any of these scam listings, and it wasn't one that had been duplicated. But the reply indicated this was a scam listing as well. Their reply was:
Yes, in our website for sale, limited promotion. If you are interested, please contact me， I can provide you our website， you can learn more about this product in detail. Our products return within 30 days, with a two-year warranty ，free shipping.
So unfortunately it now seems that finding genuine items for sale on Facebook marketplace is very difficult. With eBay listings you can usually easily if its a scam (No Buy it now, but a buy it now price listed in the description, description saying you need to contact teh seller before bidding, etc). For these Facebook marketplace items it seems you need to click on the seller's profile image, and view their other items for sale. If they have a load of other items available and all for the same price, then it indicates a fake scammer account.
I just checked the seller profile on another of the same item I'd been looking at (this one was located further from me, so I hadn't actually messaged them), and sure enough that one is a scam account as well.
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