You have just sold something. A wardrobe, a bike, a phone. The buyer is keen, the price is agreed, and the money is basically as good as in your account. Then a message arrives: "I've paid through the secure portal, just click here to release it to your bank." There is a link. It looks official. There is a logo you recognise, a padlock in the corner, a form waiting for your details.
That link is where a surprising number of marketplace deals quietly turn into a loss. Fake payment links are one of the most reliable tools a scammer has, because they arrive at the exact moment your guard is down, and because a payment page is such an ordinary thing to be sent that clicking feels like the obvious next step.
The good news is that fake payment links follow a small number of patterns. Once you can recognise them, you can slow down at the one moment that matters: before you click, and before you type anything in.
Why a payment link is the perfect place to hide a scam
We pay for things through links constantly. A link to a checkout, a link in a delivery text, a link to split a bill. Sending someone a payment page is completely normal, and that normality is exactly the cover a scammer needs.
A fake payment link does not have to look sinister. It has to look boring. It borrows the visual language of something you have used a hundred times: a bank login, a courier's tracking page, a familiar payment brand. The whole trick rests on you recognising the shape of the page and skipping the check you would do if the request felt strange.
Regulators are watching this pattern closely. In the United States, the most commonly reported form of text message scam in recent Federal Trade Commission data was a bogus bank fraud warning, the kind that sends you to a fake page to "secure your account". In the United Kingdom, authorised push payment fraud, where people are tricked into sending money themselves, ran to £450.7 million in 2024 according to UK Finance, even after new reimbursement rules came in. And in Australia, phishing sat among the top five scam categories by reported loss in the National Anti-Scam Centre's 2025 figures, part of A$2.18 billion in reported losses overall. Those are the reported numbers; most scams are never reported at all, so the real total is higher.
The shapes a fake payment link takes
There are only a few versions of this, and they repeat across every country and platform.
The "release the funds" link, aimed at sellers. You are told the buyer has paid into a holding service, and you just need to click through and confirm your bank or card details to receive the money. No real payment system works this way. Money that is genuinely owed to you lands in your account without you entering anything on a page a stranger sent you.
The fake checkout or escrow page, aimed at buyers. The seller sends a link to an "official" escrow or payment service you have not heard of, or a convincing copy of one you have. You pay, and the page, the service and the seller all disappear together.
The delivery or redelivery text. A message claiming a parcel is held pending a small fee, with a link to pay it. This one reaches people who are not even mid-deal. It works on volume, because at any moment plenty of us are genuinely waiting on something.
The "verify your account" page. Framed as your bank, a payment app, PayID in Australia or Zelle in the US, telling you to log in and confirm details to unlock or receive a payment. What you are really doing is handing your login straight to whoever built the page.
What a real payment flow never asks you to do
The fastest way to see through a fake payment link is to know the handful of things a legitimate payment will never require.
A real payment never asks you to send money in order to receive money. There is no genuine version of "pay a small fee to release your funds". A real payment never needs you to "upgrade" or "verify" your account mid-transaction to accept a transfer. And a real marketplace sale keeps the money inside the platform's own checkout wherever one exists, rather than bouncing you to an outside link. If a deal suddenly leaves the platform and lands on a payment page in your messages, that move is itself the warning sign; it is the same instinct we covered in why off-platform messaging is the first move in most marketplace scams.
The payment method matters too. Links that push you toward fast, irreversible rails leave you with no way back if things go wrong, which is the whole reason they are chosen. We went deeper on that in why instant bank transfers are the riskiest way to pay a stranger.
How to read a link before you click
You do not need to be technical to check a link. You need to look in the right place.
Read the domain, not the words. The part that matters is the main address just before the first single slash. A page can say "SecurePay" all it likes; if the address is securepay-release.co or a string of random characters, that is what you are actually visiting.
Watch for lookalikes. Scammers register addresses that read almost right at a glance: an extra word, a hyphen, a swapped letter, or a familiar brand name buried in a longer address where it has no real authority. On a phone, press and hold a link to preview where it actually goes before tapping.
Treat shortened links with extra care. A shortened or forwarded link hides its real destination by design, which is convenient for a courier and equally convenient for a scammer.
And do not let the padlock reassure you. The padlock only means the connection is encrypted, not that the site is honest. Plenty of fake pages have one. The safer habit is to never reach a payment page by clicking a link someone sent you. Open your banking app yourself, or type the address you already know, and get there under your own steam.
The moment before you click
I nearly learned this the expensive way. I was selling a fridge, and the buyer sent me a link to "accept the payment". It looked plausible enough that I got close. What stopped it was not cleverness on my part; it was my bank flagging suspicious activity and blocking the account before it could be cleared out. I got lucky. A lot of people, at that same tired, deal-is-basically-done moment, do not.
That moment is the whole point. You are at your most trusting precisely when the transaction feels finished, and that is exactly when the link arrives. Recognising the pattern buys you the few seconds you need to stop and check rather than click.
What to do before you click or enter anything
Slow down at the payment page, every time. Before you click a link or type in a single detail, run through this:
- Does this ask me to send money in order to receive it, or to pay a fee to "release" funds? If so, stop.
- Is the domain, read just before the first slash, actually the service it claims to be?
- Did this land in my messages instead of the platform's own checkout?
- Can I reach the same place by opening my banking or payment app myself, without this link?
- Is anything about the timing or wording trying to rush me?
If you are unsure, the safest move costs you nothing: do not click the link. Go to the service directly, or contact your bank using the number on your card. A genuine payment will still be there when you arrive under your own steam.
This is the exact moment Chekka is being built for: the second before you click a link or enter your details, when the page looks right, the deal feels done, and you are trying to work out whether it is safe. Chekka does not promise to catch every scam. What it does is help you see what looks risky, what proof is missing, and what to check before you commit.
We are shaping the product around real experiences right now, and what people tell us genuinely changes what gets built first. If you have ever been sent a payment link that made you pause, whether you clicked it or not, the survey takes about five minutes and your story helps stop the next person.
Survey: https://bit.ly/3QJcFej