Spotting Scams on Second-Hand Marketplaces: 8 Checks Before You Buy

The second-hand market is the best source for minifigures nobody sells any more, and for most collectors the only one. It is also where most of us have lost money once.

The underlying pattern never changes: you do not spot a scam listing by the offer but by what the seller will not do. No collection in person, no follow-up photos, no payment through the platform. Each excuse on its own is plausible. Three of them are not.

These eight checks cost an honest seller nothing and a fraudster everything. In the order that takes you the least time.

1. Reverse-search the pictures

The fastest check there is, and the one people skip. Drop the listing photo into a reverse image search. If the same picture turns up in an old auction, a forum thread or a listing from another country, you are done before you have typed a message.

Fraudsters do not photograph, they collect. The same collection therefore surfaces for months across changing listings.

2. Look at the account, not just the listing

When was it created? How many ratings, and for what? What else is on it? An account created two weeks ago that has since listed four high-value collections with nothing in common is not a collector clearing out.

Careful with bought ratings: twenty five-star reviews for two-euro items say nothing about an 800-euro sale.

3. The price — and the counter-test

Far below market value is suspicious but not proof on its own: there are estates, house clearances and people who genuinely have no idea what they are selling. Suspicion only turns into information through the counter-test.

Offer less. A collection visibly worth over €1,000 is listed at €500 — offer €350. A real seller haggles, gets annoyed, or says no. A fraudster agrees at once. The price is irrelevant to him because he has nothing to sell; he wants the deal closed.

This is the single most telling check on the list, and it takes one message.

4. The payment question

This is where it separates for good. Ask plainly: how would you like to handle payment?

• PayPal "friends and family" is not a payment method, it is a waiver. The option exists precisely so that buyer protection does not apply — that is its purpose, not a side effect. Anyone proposing it is proposing that you have no recourse.
• A bank transfer is the same thing without the detour. Once gone, gone.
• Gift card codes, crypto, "the account is my girlfriend's" need no further comment.

Then take the argument away from them. The usual objection to buyer protection is the money — a few per cent the seller does not get. So offer to cover the fee. They receive exactly the agreed amount, the protection costs them nothing, and their one reasonable objection is gone.

An honest seller accepts, or waves it off because the few euros never mattered to them. A fraudster refuses anyway — and now without a reason they can say out loud, because what bothers them is never the fee but the protection. It is the same counter-test as with the price, in reverse: you make an offer a real seller has no need to decline.

Conversely: a seller who offers to go through the platform, or accepts PayPal as a goods purchase, is carrying risk themselves. Which is exactly why fraudsters do not.

5. The move off the platform

"Message me on WhatsApp instead." That sentence has one purpose: the chat history a complaint could rest on is no longer with the platform. Nor does the operator's own pattern detection reach there.

Stay in the platform's chat. Move off it and, in a dispute, you have two screenshots instead of a file.

6. Collection in person

The hardest check, which is why it comes this late: say you live nearby and could come round today.

A real seller says yes, proposes a time, or explains plausibly why not. A fraudster is on holiday. Ask who ships it then, and a neighbour, a brother, a colleague suddenly appears — somebody who can post a parcel but cannot let anyone in. Suggest collecting from that person instead and the next excuse arrives.

Somebody who never has time and never has anyone has nothing. Including when the listing says collection is possible.

7. The paper-note test

If nothing has snagged so far and a feeling remains: ask for a photo of the goods with a note beside them — or a sticky note on the parts themselves. It should show:

• today's date
• your username
• and, this is the actual trick, something you have just made up. I ask for a drawing of a banana. It is silly, and that is why it works: the combination exists in no archive and in no other listing.

Three responses are possible. No answer — done. A photo that does not match — done. Or a photo that matches too well.

How to spot a faked photo

• The handwriting. Real handwriting is uneven: letter spacing wanders, the pen runs thin, the line drifts. Generated writing is suspiciously regular and often sits too perfectly on the paper.
• The shadows. Note and figures must throw in the same direction with the same hardness. A composited note brings its own shadow — or none at all.
• The figures themselves. This is where collectors have the advantage: generated images invent detail. A torso print gains one line too many, a helmet a curve that does not exist, a belt a colour that figure never had. If you know the figure, you see it immediately.
• The comparison with the first picture. Ask for the same arrangement as in the listing, only with the note. If something in the background shifts between the two that cannot have moved, one of them is not real.

8. The name check

Last, just before paying: do the names match? The seller is Thomas in the profile and in the chat, and the PayPal account is in the name of Gustav.

There are harmless explanations — a partner's account, a maiden name. There is also an unharmless one, more common than most people think: triangulation fraud. Somebody sells you goods they do not have and has you pay a third, unsuspecting seller from whom they have "bought". The third party ships — to the fraudster or to you — and in the end one of the two real people has paid and received nothing, while the fraudster holds the goods or the money. When it unravels, you are part of a chain running across two platforms and three accounts.

So ask when the names diverge. A real explanation arrives at once.

The ID photo that looks like the opposite

One method deserves its own section, because it feels like the end of all doubt: the seller sends a photo of their ID card, unasked. As security. So you can see they are real.

That is not proof of trust, it is a marker of fraud. For three reasons.

First, a picture proves nothing. A photo of a document says only that somebody has that photo — not that they are the person on it. Second, an honest seller has no reason to send one. Platforms verify identities themselves, in their own process; no legitimate flow has two strangers exchanging ID documents.

And third, the uncomfortable part: those IDs usually belong to earlier victims. Anyone being shown an ID photo today is, with fair probability, looking at the document of somebody who was asked a few weeks ago and complied. The same pictures circulate because they work — which is exactly why they are collected.

And you never send yours

Not to a seller, not to a buyer, not as "insurance", not for a payment that will supposedly only clear that way. In the wrong hands an ID photo is enough to open accounts, to sign contracts in your name, and to run this same trick on the next buyer.

If identity verification is genuinely needed, it happens on the platform, in its own process, on its own address — never in a chat, never by email, never as a photo to a private individual. When an ID is sent to you, the best answer is none at all: report the listing instead.

What none of this does

None of these checks is proof, and all of them together are not a guarantee. They only shift the odds — considerably, because a fraudster would have to answer every single one without owning the goods.

And the most important sentence of all: a listing you hesitate over is not a loss. Another one comes along. The urge to agree quickly because "somebody else is interested" is itself a warning sign.

Once the figures arrive

Then the second question starts: is what turned up what you paid for? Recast parts, rival brands and custom figures all look identical in a listing photo.

And what you bought is worth recording while you still remember: Plasticfolk keeps purchase price, date and source per figure — official and custom figures in the same catalogue. Next time you buy second-hand, you will also know what a fair price looks like.

Start a collection — or browse the catalogue first.