Overpayment And Fake Cheque Scams
Launch library · evergreen read
This particular pattern typically involves a buyer sending a payment that appears to noticeably exceed the agreed price for an item, then asking the seller to refund the difference fairly quickly, often well before the original payment has actually cleared and is only later revealed to be entirely fraudulent.
The trick itself relies heavily on the delay between a payment initially appearing to succeed and the later point at which it is genuinely confirmed or instead reversed as fraudulent, a gap during which a seller may well have already sent a genuine refund straight from their own personal funds.
Waiting patiently for a payment to be fully and irreversibly confirmed, not merely showing as received on screen, before ever sending any refund or releasing goods to the buyer, closes this particular gap entirely and avoids the scam altogether before any real money is ever actually lost to it in the process.