Scam warning

google lens of Roland rd200 listing SN was an exact match of some website in Japan, where the same photo was posted a month ago.

Nathan, you are not allowed to post identifying things like these auction numbers here in the Community section as it's against the rules, which you can read below the box you typed this message where it says.... By creating a Post, you agree to and abide by the Community Guidelines.

Use the Community Watch link at the bottom of any live listing which sends a report with all the info you type directly to the right people at Trademe for action. 

sorry, my bad, but identical photos are used on ebay auction. I hope it's OK to post ebay auction here 

 it is a scam and there is no one to report it to.

Edited in line with Community guidelines

No, that's not allowed either :(

There are plenty of topics in the Community watch link for reporting this eg The seller does not have the item in their possession, The seller's account has been compromised by a scammer etc etc.

You would be best to delete these posts completely.

Yes, I did report them, but it's the weekend, TM won't get it until later. They should really have a 24/7 scam watch to report those quickly. The scams from 100% positive accounts gets more active around Christmas. There are more listings in other categories, I am sure. I wonder whether "buying" those two would help-at least they will disappear from being for sale...

The trust and safety team monitor emails 24/7

I can't email to them, it bounces. I also can't report it to Tautoko bot-they say they will get back to me "soon". I don't think they have anything 24/7

Just include all the info in your community watch report on the listing and leave it to TradeMe to handle. They will investigate and take appropriate action if needed.

Member has now been disabled. Could be worth saving those items as a favourite search Nathan in case he/she is silly enough to try it again with another hacked account. More likely they will just chose another random product to try and sell.

Keep an eye on the Buyer's account which, at this stage, remains active - Cheers.

the buyer was genuine, left negative feedback and the seller left profanities in return. So, let's summarise. 24/7 scam monitoring is a myth. the scammer was active for at least 24 hours. the withdrawn auction's questions got cleaned up by TM-you can no longer see who asked wha and when. This is withdrawn auction by seller, not TM. Seller withdrew, because it looked bad to have many unanswered questions.

Seller said that they would use NZ based bank account for transfer. instead of investigating, TM just withdrew auctions without actually determining who it was. They will no doubt continue. They have even created a fake account and left themselves a positive feedback after they "bought" something off themselves.

Conclusion-TM devalued people's efforts of reporting scams and having100% feedback, as it's now seen as a red flag. 

The fake Buyer's account Nathan who made the 2 purchases & Feedback - Their account is still Live - Cheers.

I don't know who they are and it doesn't look like a trader without traders can be reported. If you are community superuser, maybe you know the way of bringing this to TM attention. But I trust them less than scammers now. They wouldn't even publish this scheme on their scams website.

I have been scammed like this a year ago and it ended up in court. Still no article to warn others. They have collected fees from the scammer(using hacked acc money) for withdrawing listings. doubt that any of this money will be refunded to the genuine trader. They also charged commission on "sold" auction yesterday. there was enough money on the hacked account to allow multiple relistings.

So, no matter how much scam is going around, TM will still take their cut.

It's easy to set up an AI bot to monitor new listings, photos, etc, but this will require effort and expense which TM isn't willing to do. I do hope that eBay will come here one day. This will be the end of TM and their practises.

Hi Nathan, Trade Me withdrew the auction that I was watching, not the seller.

There is a possibility that "buyer" who left negative feedback knew the item was fraudulent, and purchased it simply to leave  feedback and warn others. I have seen people do this before.  Not necessarily the best way to do things, but there is little risk in doing that, knowing the sellers account will eventually be disabled.

"Hi Callum, The auction for "Nord xxxxxxxxxxxx", which is on your watchlist, has been withdrawn by Trade Me customer support as it breached our terms and conditions"

PS: eBay did try a New Zealand specific website years ago. Didn't work and we subsequently got merged into the Australian version. Our market is simply too small for a large player like that.

Kia ora, thanks for reporting those listings and for keeping an eye out, it pays to be vigilant! The team will be all over these, but if you do see them popping up again or similar listings, follow Gary and Callum's advice and report those via Community watch Nathan, those go to the right team to take action.

Nathan,

There are a few ways to report non Traders with suspect activity, you can contact TradeMe through "Live Chat" for assistance with this Or send them a message via the Contact us drop down forms - these are not easy to find though a specific one which allows free form text is through the following form Submit a request – Help - Trade Me

A 3rd option would be to return email any communication you have recently had with TradeMe staff which has a Ticket Id # attached to it. - Cheers.

Yes, I was referring to the earlier auction. Seller had the same item listed, blacklisted me for asking questions, but having 5 unanswered questions looked bad, so he withdrew and relisted it. TM withdrew the new one, but TM also went into the auction that seller withdrew himself and removed all the questiones-both answered and unanswered. this auctions is still sitting in my Lost items and I see no questions anymore. This action is puzzling. TM went into trouble of removing the questions but not investigating the sam. It almost makes them complacent. I would post the withdrawn auction number, but I don't want another copypaste on Community guidelines here.

I hope ebay would reconsider. 

So, all mopped, scammer spooked and will try their luck listing something else. TM none the wiser.

yes, S, did all of the above and still no reply. I have been a member for a long time. Despite of what was said here, there is no 24/7 community watch. To Michelle-no, TM won't be "all over" this-they wouldn't even publish the article outlining this scam. I've been asking for a year now. The only reply I got is that they would "consider". You have chosen a very ineffective strategy to fight this kind of scam, because it still must be bringing more revenue than nipping it in the bud. Please read TM Trustpilot reviews, there are at least 6 more mentions of the same scam and still nothing from TM to address this, not even an article-this would cost you nothing.

… and just got "Sorry to hear the trouble with the trade hasn’t been sorted. A Disputes Officer in our team will be reviewing this under our Buyer Protection policy and will be in touch within the next four weeks."

That's just embarrassing.

Hi Markus, were you one of the people scammed by Nord piano listings? TM removed at least 3 of them in the past 24 hours. I find TM actions infuriating rather than embarassing. They got rid of TM message board, were traders could warn each other much more effectively and are now taking their time to remove the listings. The last one was removed quite fast, but not allowing scammers to hack accounts would be a much more effective strategy. Hope that you didn't lose too much money, not much hope getting it back.

to those who are following the thread-one of the scam listings was from account with 99,2% positive feedback-the scammers must have run out of 100% positive ones, so just beware, be careful if there is no pickup and a really cheap shipping option for a bulky item, no PING and I will now always be searching photos with google lens. The Nord scammer used different photos on each withdrawn auction, but the exact matches would still come up.

I just don't understand why TM makes us work so hard.

Nathan you can read more of Markus's issues by clicking his name and seeing his other posts.

Nothing has changed in regard to the Trade Me messageboards. We were never allowed to mention other sellers or their auctions on the old system either.

Trade Me has added 2FA if people are concerned about their account being hacked. That is optional at this stage, so maybe doesn't help people with old or abandoned accounts and weak or Pwned passwords.

If you are worried about purchasing a more expensive item insist on Ping. If the seller won't add that, walk away..........

THank you Callum,

I didn't know you could click on people's names. I hope TM appreciates the work that you do on their behalf. I've had my fair share of frustration with PING, TM doesn't seem to have any guidelines of how long the refund would take, my personal experience-3 months. That's giving them a free loan of my money.

two more fraudulent listings just popped up, after TM removed all the Nords The scammer is now into Korg kronos and Pioneer DJ XDJ-XZ Both offer cheap shipping and no pickup, and another 100% positive account must have been hacked. That's at least 5 accounts in the past 24 hours! Was there a massive data leak or something?

How do scammers even know which accounts to hack-they only use the accounts which weren't active for several years. Do they just randomly punch in traders names into TM "find trader" page to see when they were active? I just tried this and found an account which wasn't active since 2002. TM must disable that page, they are helping them. We shouldn't be able to see what user names there are. It's the weak link.

Could be just brute force 'bot attacks. Thousands of accounts tested for passwords using common passwords. But what is much more likely is that people have been lazy and used the same username and password across multiple websites. This was especially common in the past. Which could explain why it's usually old accounts that have been hacked.

There has never been a Trade Me data breach that I know of. But there have been plenty of others. So it's relatively easy for a 'bot to simply trawl Trade Me looking for usernames that appear in a dataset dump, and then trying the same password from  that dataset to see if it matches up to that username on Trade Me.  I can guarantee that many probably do.

10 or even 5 years ago things like password managers and browsers or phones that can securely save many different passwords didn't exist. So people had the same password and username on multiple platforms. I remember myself that it was nearly impossible to try and remember a different password / username combo on dozens of different websites. So I was guilty of it.

Thanks Nathan,

I have Community watched Both of those Listings for you as well.

I have been requesting for an Alert Tab to be placed in Community to send Urgent Scam/Hack info' through to the Team especially in Afterhours mode to attract attention to these cases coming through the Community Forum - I haven't been given a "Consider" response like you as yet! 

In the Member Profile page we see New Members joining which is a very helpful tool for picking out some of the scammers signing up.

How come both Korg and Pioner listing sold, but we can't see who to? Did they make an offer? I was considering "buying" it myself, but I can't possibly do more work for TM. It is now obvious that if scammers list things after business hours, it won't be picked up till next morning, by which time it could be sold already.

S, my "thank you for your suggestion, we will consider it" copypaste email response came after the conclusion of the court case with TM, we pushed it as far as we could to be taken seriously, but still no article on scams from 100% positive accounts

So I took one for the team last night and bought myself a Korg. For research purposes. :)  If you want to try this it’s important to play safe. You can use a throwaway email address. I also changed my delivery address to the Whangarei Police Station. The seller is in Whangarei.

So far the seller has sent me a bank account (it’s BNZ Manukau branch) and demanded payment in 24 hours and a screenshot. First thing I sent through a report to BNZ to get them to look at / freeze the account. Banks are taking these things more seriously now after some bad press recently. Since then they have sent 2 more ever increasingly urgent emails asking for payment and screenshot proof. Typical behaviour.

I have also tracked down who I think is the real owner of the Trade Me account. She has a very unique name. I’ve sent her an email via her work to inform her that her account has been compromised. Hopefully she answers. She might have an idea of how the alleged scammer got access to her account.

From here I will just ignore the seller and send through some stalling tactics at the 23^rd hour. I’m on the road today so wont be able to update on here until late afternoon or tonight.

PS Nathan you can’t always see the buyer on buynow only purchases. Has been like this for a few years. Sometimes you can see it on bidbud, but not always.