It’s utterly bizarre to believe that innocent people trying to sell their goods on classified advertising platforms like Olx end up LOSING their money. The fact that this platform doesn’t have any security measures as to who the user is, it’s really easy for scammers to target sellers. When people get sound offers for their adverts they confirm the deal in excitement as the scammers make satisfactory offer without even bargaining. The lack of understanding of digital payment services and UPI among the cohort is helping fraudulent activities to rise. Even though olx has a feature to hide your contact details, you eventually end up sharing it as you think you’re dealing with a genuine buyer. The most recent scam is the one with Army card and it goes like this:

The buyer calls you and tells you how lucky he is to find your advertised product at such a good price and accepts to pay the displayed amount or sometimes even more. 

You might get multiple calls bargaining at a lower price just to make you think the person who called first is the highest bidder. 

The person will ask your Google pay or similar UPI id and says that they’ll transfer the money through that. 

Instead of sending the money, the person will use “Request Rs. X” option on such platforms.

While they send this link to you via SMS, they’ll be on the phone call and try to distract you and you hastily click on the link as it’ll display your agreed amount. You don’t bother to read that it’s a withdrawal request as the person on the phone completely takes your attention off it. 

They might even ask more as they’ll say that it’s an ARMY account and that’s how it works. You lose your money with just a SINGLE CLICK and boom! it’s gone before you even realise. 

My dad was caught by this fraudster bunch while selling his Apple Watch. Glad he didn’t click on any link otherwise he’d have lost Rs.35000. The alleged buyer sent photo of an Army card that he’d be using for payment.

It all sounds so genuine that even well read people fall for it. OLX should take immediate security measures as there are thousands of people out there who lost a significant amount of money which is unfortunately not recoverable (thanks to our cyber crime team). 

There should be a security setting where you cannot share you personal details on OLX (fyi this feature is available in ebay where the message won’t be sent if it contains sensitive information like email or contact number). There should be a payment platform on OLX so buyer will make the payment through the app, seller receives the money (or OLX puts the money on hold until the item is delivered) and it’s all safe and secure. This way people won’t fall for fraudsters while trying to get the payments outside the app. It’s really important 

P.s. support this if you think that it’s of immense importance that online advertising platforms should have their in-built payment services and help to decrease such crimes as it’s really easy to be a victim of such crimes (trust me! they act so genuine that you won’t even doubt a bit). 

Thank you