A buyer named luyang (USERNAME:TANGLUYANG) contacted me on carousell to buy my secondhand clothes ( which cost only $12). Initially, she was asking for some extra information about the clothes and I asked to meetup in person to make the deal. I stay in the east and she stays in the west , so i asked to compromise and told her i could meet around town area. This was when she offered to get a courier service herself to get the items from my house to deliver them to her house. She asked me for my house address, mobile phone number and email address so she could ask the courier to get the items from me. I did not have any second thoughts and gave all my information to her. Then, the nightmare began; She told me that she would transfer $12 to me through PAYNOW with caroupay. I have heard it’s a new in-app feature but have never used it before so I do not know how it works. She sent me multiple screenshots of the payment made to my mobile phone number on PAYNOW and they looked legit. I then received an email on my gmail account with the title: “Caroupay confirmation” and the sender address was [buyandsale.carousell@gmail.com]. The content in the email was:

Dear Customer,

A payment has been made to your paynow no. from luyang through caroupay, kindly complete your login on our carousell website for your funds to be added to your paynow account. Please paste the URL below to your browser: confirmation-proceeds.herokuapp.com [NOTE: Fake website. Do NOT click]

At this point, I somehow knew something was wrong and hesitated to click into the link. However, like people said :curiosity killed the cat. I clicked into the website to see what is going on, and not to my surprise, it was a DBS homepage (with the strange URL above) and it prompt me to enter my ibanking id and password. I closed the webpage immediately and confronted the buyer. She insisted that nothing was wrong and her payment did not get transferred to my account successfully and kept asking me to login to the link sent to my email to get her payment. This was when I blocked her and reported her account to carousell. Even though I did not lose any money in this scamming incident, but I did share personal information such as my home address.

I hope my story acts as a warning for those who are dealing with strange buyers like this on any online platforms and please don’t be like me, who clicked into a suspicious URL link sent to your email.