The Check Cleared. Then It Didn't. How to Spot a Fake Buyer on Facebook Marketplace.

The check cleared. The buyer seemed normal. Then you sent the refund.

That sequence hits thousands of Facebook Marketplace sellers every year. Most of the public conversation about Marketplace fraud is about buyers: fake listings, items that never arrive, counterfeit goods. The seller side gets less coverage. That's part of why these scams keep working.

This post is for people who list things on Marketplace and have had that moment, mid-conversation with an eager buyer, where something felt slightly off.

The overpayment check

A buyer reaches out about your listing. They're friendly, they respond fast, and they say they prefer to pay by check — they're traveling, or buying on someone else's behalf, or have some reason they can't use an app. The check arrives and it's for more than your asking price. They apologize and ask you to deposit it, then send back the difference.

Your bank shows the funds as available. You wire the refund. A few days later, the bank reverses the deposit. The check was fake. The wire you already sent is gone.

Here's the thing most people don't know: banks make deposited check funds "available" before they've actually confirmed the check is real. Available and cleared are not the same thing. By the time the bank catches the fraud, your money is already somewhere else.

The tell: a buyer paying by check who sends more than your asking price. No legitimate buyer does this. There is no explanation for it that isn't a scam. End the transaction.

The fake payment screenshot

The buyer says they've already paid — Zelle, Cash App, PayPal. They send a screenshot showing a completed transfer. It looks right. You hand over the item or ship it.

No money ever arrives. A screenshot can be faked in under two minutes with any photo editor. Payment apps don't confirm a transaction by showing the sender a screen you can verify. The only confirmation is money in your account.

Don't release an item until you can see the payment in your account — not pending, actually there — and you've confirmed it by opening the app yourself, not by looking at what the buyer sent you.

A side note on PayPal: even "goods and services" payments can be disputed months later, and sellers frequently lose those disputes. For anything valuable, cash at pickup is the only option that removes the reversal risk entirely.

The fake shipping label

A buyer wants a high-value item shipped rather than picked up locally. They offer to handle logistics and send you a prepaid label. You print it, drop off the package, wait for payment.

Payment doesn't come. In some versions, the label was generated fraudulently using a stolen shipping account. In others, the buyer claims the package never arrived and disputes any payment that was made, leaving you with neither the money nor the item.

If a buyer insists on providing their own label, don't use it. You generate the label and add shipping to the sale price. If they push back, that's your answer.

What these have in common

All three scams are built on the same thing: the buyer gives you a reason to act first — send the refund, hand over the item, drop the package — before the payment is actually real. Once you've acted, the money is gone.

Some other signals that tend to come with these scams: the buyer moves the conversation off Marketplace into text messages early on, which makes it harder to report them later. They can't do local pickup — there's always a travel reason, a distance issue, a busy schedule. They're flexible and agreeable about everything except meeting in person. They push the pace.

Two or three of those things together: slow down.

If something already feels wrong

Paste the conversation into Scamanot. The tool looks at what you've described and tells you what the patterns suggest — not whether a name shows up in a database, but what the situation itself looks like. If the buyer is real, they'll wait five minutes. If they won't, you've already learned something useful.

Scamanot provides information to assist your own judgment. We do not guarantee the accuracy of findings or the legitimacy of any entity investigated.