There is a particular moment in a marketplace deal where everything seems to be going well.
You have agreed on a price. The seller (or buyer) is friendly. The listing looks fine. And then they say something like:
"Can you PayID it?"
Or "Zelle works for me."
Or "Just send it to my Cash App."
Or "I'll send you my bank details, instant transfer is easier."
This is the moment where a large share of marketplace scams quietly succeed. Not because the listing was obviously fake. Not because the message thread had typos. But because the payment method itself does most of the scammer's work.
Why instant payment systems became scam-friendly
Almost every major economy now has at least one fast, account-to-account payment system that lets people send money to each other using little more than a phone number, email or username.
Australia has PayID. The US has Zelle, Venmo and Cash App. The UK has Faster Payments. The EU has SEPA Instant. Brazil has Pix. India has UPI. Singapore has PayNow.
These systems were not designed for scams. They were designed to make sending money to people you actually know easier — splitting a dinner bill, paying rent to a flatmate, sending a friend their share of a holiday booking.
They share three features that make them brilliant for that purpose, and disastrous when used to pay a stranger from a marketplace listing.
They are instant. Once the money lands in the recipient's account, the transaction is effectively done. There is no holding period, no clearing window, no buffer where you can change your mind.
They are irreversible. Unlike a credit card payment or a PayPal Goods and Services transaction, there is no built-in dispute mechanism. If the person you paid turns out to be a scammer, your bank generally cannot pull the money back. You can ask. You can report. But the structural answer is usually no.
They have no built-in buyer protection. These are payment rails, not buyer-protection schemes. They were built on the assumption that you know and trust the person you are paying.
This is what scammers exploit. The combination of "fast", "irreversible" and "no protection" is exactly the environment where a marketplace scam wants to operate.
The pattern shows up in the numbers. In the first nine months of 2025, US consumers reported losing more than US$370 million to scams on peer-to-peer payment apps like Zelle — nearly 35% higher than the same period the year before. In Australia, payment redirection has consistently sat in the top five scam categories by reported loss in the National Anti-Scam Centre's annual data, and bank-reported marketplace losses skew toward many small-value PayID transfers in the low hundreds rather than a few big ones. The UK pattern is similar: Authorised Push Payment fraud — the regulatory term for "you instructed the bank to send the money to a scammer" — accounts for the largest share of consumer scam losses tracked by UK Finance.
And those are reported numbers. The vast majority of marketplace scams never reach a national reporting body at all.
What a payment-method push usually looks like
The "Can you PayID it?" moment rarely comes alone. It is usually part of a sequence.
A buyer (or seller) responds quickly to your listing or inquiry. They are agreeable on price. They are friendly. They suggest moving the conversation to WhatsApp or SMS — sometimes citing dodgy notifications on the platform. And then, when it is time to pay, they push for one specific method.
If you are the seller, the pattern often involves a fake "payment confirmation" email or screenshot. The buyer claims they have paid, but the money has not landed. Then comes a story: the bank needs you to verify, the buyer accidentally paid too much, the courier needs a fee, you need to upgrade your account to receive the funds.
None of these things are how real payment systems work. No real bank asks you to send money in order to receive money. No real payment system requires an "account upgrade" mid-transaction. No real courier asks the seller to pay.
If you are the buyer, the pattern usually involves a request to pay before any inspection or independent verification. The seller insists on the fast payment method specifically because it removes your ability to back out once the money has moved.
What the payment method tells you about the risk
A useful way to think about marketplace payments is to ask one question: if this turns out to be a scam, what is my path to getting the money back?
That single question reframes the whole conversation.
Credit cards generally let you dispute a charge. The card network sits between you and the merchant. Recovery is not guaranteed, but the path exists.
PayPal Goods and Services (not "Friends and Family") provides a dispute window for items not received or significantly not as described. Coverage is conditional, but the path exists.
Platform-native checkout flows (eBay's checkout, Facebook Marketplace's shipping checkout where available, Depop payments) usually carry some form of buyer protection. The platform sits in the middle.
Instant bank transfers, peer-to-peer payment apps, crypto, gift cards. The path mostly does not exist. The money moves directly from your account to theirs, and the system was not built to reverse it.
This is not about whether PayID or Zelle or Venmo or Pix are "safe" in a technical sense. They are. The technology works as designed. The risk is in using them for the wrong job — paying someone you have not met, for an item you have not inspected, on a platform that does not sit between you.
What to do next
The simplest rule is the one Australian banks have started using in their own scam warnings, and it mirrors guidance from Action Fraud in the UK and the FTC in the US: treat the marketplace as a way to organise an in-person exchange, not as a payment platform.
A few practical applications:
For in-person sales, cash on collection is still the lowest-risk option. You see the item, you hand over the money, the deal is done. No reversibility problem because no reversal is needed.
For anything that has to be shipped or paid before collection, use a method with a dispute mechanism — PayPal Goods and Services, or a credit card through the platform's official checkout. Not the payment method the other party is pushing for.
If a buyer or seller refuses to use a protected payment method, that refusal is itself the answer. A legitimate counterparty has no structural reason to insist on the riskiest payment rail. A scammer does.
And if you ever see the phrase "I will send you a verification fee" or "you need to upgrade your account to receive payment" — that is a fully formed scam, every time. No payment system in any country works that way.
Chekka is being built to help everyday people see the risk in a marketplace deal — the listing, the message, the link, the payment request — before money changes hands. We are running a short anonymous survey to shape the MVP around what people actually need. It takes around five minutes, and if you have ever felt unsure about an online deal, your perspective would genuinely help.
Survey: https://bit.ly/4a9DpuF
If you know someone who regularly buys or sells online, please share this post with them — that single forward is the most useful thing any reader can do right now.