Over 75% drop in fraud with Marktplaats payment requests
The Limburg police and Markptlaats teamed up to fight fraud with payment requests through the online marketplace, and the collaboration is having a massive effect. Between January 2021 and December 2022, the number of Martplaats payment request fraud cases dropped by 76.5 percent, the police said on Friday.
This type of fraud involves scammers posing as buyers on Marktplaats. They contact a seller as an interested party and convince them to continue the conversation outside of Markptlaats, for example, on WhatsApp.
The scammer sends the seller a payment request for 1 cent, asking the seller to prove they are trustworthy. The link takes the seller to a phishing site, where the scammer can watch the seller type in the login details for their online banking. The scammer can then log into the victim’s bank account and withdraw funds.
Because this happened outside the Martplaats chat function, the platform can’t do anything about it.
According to Sylvia Laurensse of the Limburg police’s cybercrime team, this type of fraud happens on all online marketplaces. But in the Netherlands, the vast majority of reports come from Marktplaats - 90 percent in 2020. At peak times, the police received about a thousand reports per month, with scammers stealing at least 500,000 euros per month. Since the Limburg police teamed up with Makrtplaats to fight it, the number of reports of payment request fraud dropped to about 100 per month.
A large part of the decrease is due to prevention. The police and Marktplaats actively inform users about how fraudsters may target them. Marktplaats also took technical measures to make it more difficult for people to contact sellers outside the platform. For example, sellers’ telephone numbers used to be visible on the site. Sellers can still state their number but must explicitly give permission to do so, and a warning about this type of fraud pops up.
Marktplaats also added options that offer buyers and sellers more certainty. For example, they can now opt for buyer protection with iDEAL payment requests. The seller then only gets their money when the buyer confirms they received the purchased item.
Laurensse expects that the extra security measures at Marktplaats will cause a shift in fraud to other online marketplaces. The police have not yet seen an increase in payment request fraud on other platforms, but Laurensse stressed that the police could only signal such an increase if victims report it.
“We often see that people do not report a crime out of shame or ignorance. It is extremely important that victims do come forward because it is through these reports that we get a picture of a phenomenon and set the right priorities in detection, prevention, and disruption,” she said.