Scam warning

Lol, I like how he learned how to spell scammer from your replies to comments. No idea what a scamer is.

Wow indeed. I hope that they are removed ASAP. You have really taken one for the team and I hope that TM will appreciate you doing their job by providing you with some benefits(but who am I kidding...) Thank you for doing this, Callum! This also means that TM would have to refund you all the "success" fees that were immediately taken off you(the only thing TM seems to do fast is to take your money) 

Second scammer just relisted the Nord that Callum bought, so the fraudulent account is still active, 36 hours after the initial listing.

Kia ora TM user, is that account still live? Can you pop it through live chat if it is please so we can take it down.

That listing and a few others were withdrawn by TM at 5:30 this morning Michelle. The membership is also now disabled., along with another membership too. There is another membership that is still active that had similar listings, so maybe the real owners have got that under control now.

Yep, as Gary said disabled early this morning. 1 of the 3 other known accounts that were compromised by the same scammer and left me bulk negative feedback has been disabled. The other 2 are still live but I have been in contact and they are being checked.

Summary-the fraudulent account listings were active for the whole weekend. Callum still has 37 negative feedbacks left by a feral scammer on his account, still not removed by TM. This has now got to a stage when other members are affected while trying to fight scammers (instead of TM)

How's that scam article going, Michelle? So far I talked to Anthony, Shara, Kirsty and you. All of you said that you would "pass it on" to your team. Can someone from the team who received at least 4 messages in the past year, acknowledge the problem? Disabling accounts is not an effective solution. 

Kia ora, thanks Callum and Gary, sounds like you've had it covered. Any feedback from scammers should get removed, if not, just give me a shout and I can follow it up.

Thanks for following up on the article TM user, it is with the right team but I don't have an update for you, sorry.

The scammer is back onto it. This time, from a fresh account, not the dormant one. But the $ sign at the shipping is a giveaway. Selme 1974r Mark VI saxophone, anyone??

my bad, they had their last trade a year ago, I still live in 2024! The auction been active for several days now despite 5 unanswered questions and people obviously cautious. Still. How's that article going, Michelle?

Gone now.

Well spotted again. I guess there could be more coming if this scammer manages to take over accounts in groups.

sorry that you missed out on the opportunity to buy a sax, Callum 🤪

Another trader just got scammed from a 100% positive account for $6,800 I don't care about the rules, below is the listing (the trader since been disabled). Still no warning article from TM about it. If you can't be bothered warning people, why not at least disable the page, where one can see all traders accounts? I suspect that's how scammers get the names of those accounts which were dormant for a while.

Trade Me helpfully lists them for scammers to hack. I am doing your job regularly monitoring music instruments category, I don't know enough about watches to do that there.

https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/marketplace/jewellery-watches/watches/mens-watches/sports/listing/5129451775?archive=1&bof=TcvtlJPy

I am talking about this page.https://www.trademe.co.nz/Community/MemberProfiles.aspx

Trade me must remove it to make it more difficult for scammers to access people's accounts by clicking on their trader names 

TM user, not sure what you mean by "disable the page, where one can see all traders accounts". You can search for members if you know their membername on other pages too and that member search page only shows a search box and recently updated profiles. It's actually a good page for members and staff to spot scammers early and report them to TM as there are numerous giveaway signs that show up on that page. Some days I report none, some days I report a dozen. It's actually a hindrance for scammers, not a help. There are much quicker and easier ways to randomly check members to see which ones haven't been used recently to target, by just using their member id number, rather than a name. 

Thank you for your explanation, Gary, I didn't know that. I thought how would scammers know which trade accounts weren't used for a while? The names can be pretty random. Maybe they just crunch the ID numbers to find out names... I think there is much more that TM can do.

Many members leave themselves open to be targets by including contact details in the main description body of their listings, rather than only in the special fields where it's allowed. One of my fav searches that I get emailed every day returns over 4,000 listings like this.

But the search gives you live listings, which means they are not the accounts that the scammers are after. My question is, how do scammers search for dormant accounts names?

TM user,

You may be overthinking this - like I often do, - the scammers may not be searching by account names, only attaining the name when a bot encounters a dormant account or perhaps an ID result returns a dormant account. - Cheers.

"My question is, how do scammers search for dormant accounts names?" I agree with S. I'm not sure they would deliberately target dormant accounts. Just that's the ones they most commonly stumble upon. Some possibilities could be bulk 'bot testing of accounts using common passwords. Getting a backdoor entry through a compromised email account. Using published lists of usernames and passwords for other (non Trade Me) compromised accounts. Sometimes people use the same ID and password on Trade Me that they use on other websites or forums. They could then trawl Trade Me for the same username and test it with the published password from one of the many data dumps.