by I was going to write about something else, but I had a bit of drama last night.
I very nearly got scammed. I put my old mattress on OLX, Romania’s version of TradeMe. Price 300 lei. Then someone WhatsApped me. How old is the mattress? What sort of condition? Could you arrange delivery? Lots of messages. He was insistent. God, this sounds like a lot of hassle. If you haven’t done it before, I’ll show you how. Still sounds like faff, but OK. Here’s the link. You’ll pay for delivery, right? Yes. I’ll pay you, then you just have to accept the payment, and the guy from the delivery company will call you to pick it up.
Now here’s the clever part. The link, which directed me to a page asking for my card details (why do you need those?) also brought up a live chat facility, which a lot of organisations now have. “I’m Mihai. How can I help you?” It all looked remarkably genuine. “Just tap in your number, go to your banking app, then tap to confirm.” I don’t like this, but whatever. My banking app then asked me to confirm that I wanted to make a payment of 1400 lei (£250; NZ$500) to somebody unknown. CANCEL!
For a few minutes I was worried I’d actually made the payment. Then I googled “OLX deliveries” and discovered that I’d nearly been the victim of a common scam. Everything was bogus. The live chat thingy was what fooled me, that damn Mihai who was just him, the scammer. It just seemed like another of the dozens of situations in the last few weeks that I’d been faced with something a bit dodgy and uncomfortable under time pressure but had to reluctantly go ahead with it. And all in Romanian. I wondered if he targeted me; because OLX unfortunately uses real names (they appear on the site as first name and last initial), he could have seen that I probably wasn’t from these parts and was easier prey.
I then called the bank to get my card blocked. The woman told me that someone had already tried (and failed) to use my card to buy something for hundreds of Singapore dollars.
This was a narrow escape. I kicked myself afterwards for being so gullible, for getting that close to losing hundreds or thousands. But having weird shit thrown at me from all directions on a regular basis does excuse me somewhat.
