This blog post was first published in https://blog.vesicash.com/i-ran-away-from-instagram-only-to-be-duped-on-twitter-a-story-of-scammers-lurking-in-all-corners/

Buying from numerous IG stores is gradually becoming an extreme sport and it looks like these scammers won’t stop at anything until they swindle us all. With all the news flying around, I became extra careful when purchasing anything online because I know that my tears are too costly to spend on a scammer.

Back to the main story, I was surfing through the different pictures of a vendor on Twitter. I have been the one to consider Twitter a saner place to shop when compared to Instagram- little did I know that these scammers are in the same Whatsapp group.

It was a pair of heels that I wanted to buy. This vendor had really nice stock, to be honest and I told myself that I had finally gotten a good plug for heels. I had saved the image of the ones that I wanted to get and had entered the DM to have conversations with the vendor.

This vendor had even graciously given me a discount since I was a first-time customer. I asked about the mode of payment that she used and she explained how she’d been duped by some Buyers in the future and why she only resorted to payment before delivery. According to her, she had to pay the company that produces the heels directly.

I don’t know if it was the fact that I had landed a good deal or it was my own impatience to ask her for the name of the company but, I ended up transferring the sum of 20,000 naira into the account number that she had provided and we had an agreement that she would get a balance of 5,000 once she delivered.

Her policy was that delivery of the goods could take as much as a week so I wasn’t bothered when I didn’t get it for the first five days. Exactly a week after our first conversation, I reached out to her again to confirm the status of my shipping. She explained that there was a delay and told me to give her extra 2 days to sort things out.

It was the following day that this vendor’s name randomly popped up on my timeline- another customer had called her out for being a scam and some knots turned in my belly. However, I still gave her the benefit of doubt and decided to wait until one more day to confirm things myself.

The day she had promised me eventually came and I was super excited when I got a call from a delivery guy who told me he had a package for me. Don’t forget that I was still owing her the balance of 5,000 so, I entered her DM to be sure that she was the one that had sent me a package but I realized that she wasn’t responding.

Maybe I trust people too much because I still waited for the delivery guy to arrive, I got my package truly and paid the delivery charges to him. I was excited to rock my heels to Church on Sunday but all of the excitement faded when I opened the package- staring back at me from a box were a pair of low-quality, Aba-manufactured heels that looked like they had seen better days.

I was livid and went back to check the pictures of the product she had earlier shared with me just to be certain that I wasn’t dreaming. The pictures looked perfect but these heels look a whole mile away from being the sleek pair of heels that I had ordered.

I rushed to pick up my phone and was going to ask her what happened to my heels on the way. I mean, these shoes looked like something I would have easily gotten for less than 5k at Yaba on a good evening. I tried sending her a message but I discovered that my line had been blocked from reaching her. I called the line that she had used to forward her bank details but it was switched off. It was at that point that I figured that I had eventually joined the group of those that had been scammed by online vendors.

Since this experience, I became extra conscious of the Vendors I transacted with since I didn’t want a repetition. I have made sure to double-check a Vendor’s handles across all platforms and also use Vesicash’s Vendors by Vesicash service to be sure that their claims are legit. I have also become an advocate of an extra layer of payment security, this is why I ensure that no digital payment is made by me unless it is into escrow.

Do not wait till you waste your money on substandard goods or even end up paying for things that will never make their way to you. Vesicash Escrow services is a crusader of safe digital transactions and it is best if you start enjoying this cloak of safety, trust, assurance, and control too.


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