How to buy shoes, dress and stroller safely and profitably

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 14:00

You can find almost everything online - from new sneakers from the limited Nike collection to the vintage Dior bag, which all fashionistas have been hunting for for six months - and even at good prices. Since the beginning of the pandemic, even those of us who used to only practice offline shopping have become accustomed to buying from online stores. Naturally, fraudsters also flow to where buyers go. We will tell you how to make online shopping profitable and safe.

First rule: go shopping on popular resources. Firstly, you will find a lot of interesting proposals there. Moreover, you can buy the desired item both in the online store and from a fashionista or just a young mother who empties her wardrobe and sells things that she never wore. For example, more than 72 million ads are presented on Avito: from baby carriages (by the way, buying a used one can be much more reasonable and profitable) to haute couture bags.

1. Do not trust advertisements with prices well below market prices. Who will sell a good thing at a loss? But scammers often use incredibly low prices to attract the attention of buyers.
2. Do not transfer prepayment to the seller, no matter what he says. Transferring money to strangers is generally not worth it.

Let's say everything has gone well so far: you have chosen a bag, the price suits you and does not arouse suspicion. But here the seller offers to make an advance payment and accompanies the request with a hint that you are far from the only potential buyer of a rare item. This is what scammers often do: by stirring up interest, they receive an advance payment and stop responding to a potential buyer. Always remember: no matter how polite and charming the seller is, there is a stranger in front of you, which means that he should not transfer money.

If the seller has sent a link for payment, do not click on it, and even more so do not enter the card details

You have agreed on everything, and the seller sends a link to the payment form, where you need to enter the card details to pay for delivery, and the remaining amount will be debited when you have the item. Only by leaving your data on such a site, you will transfer access to the card and the funds on it to scammers. Attackers often create copies of payment forms of well-known banks in order to trick the card details of reckless users. It is easy to check whether the site is real in front of you - if there is anything in the browser line other than avito.ru, for example, avitoshop.ru or avit0.ru - you are in front of a fake.

To avoid such cases, ad platforms block the sending of links in the built-in messengers.

If the ad service has the opportunity to correspond with the seller, discuss the details of the purchase without leaving the site. So, if something happens, the security service will be able to track the actions of fraudsters and come to your aid

Messengers on platforms are needed not only for convenience, but also for the safety of the buyer and seller. For example, sending links to external resources is prohibited in the Avito messenger, so fraudsters simply cannot transfer the buyer to a fake site. If the seller agrees to discuss the purchase only by phone or WhatsApp, this is a reason to be very wary.

Of course, vigilance is the best way to fight scammers. But the services themselves try to protect their users from errors as much as possible. For example, Avito pays increased attention to the safety of purchases, namely:

• even before appearing on the site, all ads are checked for the authenticity of the photos, the correspondence of the description to the real product and the adequacy of the price;
• blocks attempts to send links to third-party resources inside the service;
• in the most popular sections of the site and application, you will find reminders on how to buy safely and profitably - with the beginning of quarantine, there are more of them so that you do not miss out on the important things;
• transfers information about fraudsters to law enforcement agencies in order to even more effectively fight cybercriminals.

Thanks to the work of the security service, the number of user complaints that scammers still managed to deceive decreased by 7 times compared to the middle of last year. Of course, when shopping online - as well as offline, you need to be careful. But if you follow simple safety rules, online shopping will become the most convenient and profitable, and new shoes and a dress will only bring joy.