The listing is a near-new iPhone, a couple of generations old, priced a few hundred dollars under what everyone else is asking. The photos are clear. The seller replies quickly, sounds friendly, and says it has to go today because they have already upgraded.
It looks like the deal you have been waiting for. It might be. Or it might be a phone that is locked to someone else's account, blacklisted by the carrier, or sitting in a photo the seller copied from a listing on the other side of the country.
Secondhand electronics scams are some of the most common on any marketplace, and for good reason. Phones, laptops, tablets and consoles are high value, in constant demand, easy to resell, and almost impossible to verify properly from a few photos and a chat thread. Shopping scams were the most reported loss-making scam type in Australia in 2024, with more than 10,000 people reporting losses, and the pattern is the same wherever marketplaces operate. The good news is that electronics are also one of the easier categories to check, if you know what you are looking at.
Why electronics are the perfect scam target
Most scams cluster around the same conditions: high value, high demand, and low verifiability. Electronics tick all three.
A used car is expensive but at least you can inspect it. A handbag can be authenticated. A phone, by contrast, is a sealed box that either does something or does not, and most of what matters is invisible until you have already paid. Is it locked to an account? Is it blacklisted? Is the battery shot? Is it even the model in the photos? You usually cannot tell from a listing, which is exactly the gap scammers work in.
There are really only a handful of ways an electronics deal goes wrong, and once you can name them, you can check for each one.
The locked phone problem
This is the big one, and the most common reason a "working" phone turns out to be a brick.
Modern phones are tied to an account. On an iPhone, that is Apple's Activation Lock, linked to the seller's Apple ID through Find My. On Android, it is Google's Factory Reset Protection. If the previous owner does not properly sign out and remove the device from their account before you buy it, the phone will demand their login the moment you try to set it up, and there is nothing you can do about it. No password, no phone.
Sometimes this is innocent: a seller who simply did not know to sign out. Sometimes it is deliberate, because the phone was never theirs to sell. Either way, the result is identical for you.
The check is simple. Before you pay, the device should be fully reset in front of you and walked through to the home screen, with no account lock appearing. For an iPhone, that means Find My is switched off and the Apple ID has been removed in Settings. If a seller cannot or will not reset the phone and show you a clean setup, treat that as the answer.
Blacklisted and stolen handsets
A phone can work perfectly and still be useless, because the handset itself has been blocked.
Every phone has a unique IMEI number. When a phone is reported lost, stolen, or has unpaid finance against it, carriers can blacklist that IMEI, which blocks it from connecting to mobile networks. The phone powers on, the screen lights up, everything looks fine on wifi, and then it will never hold a SIM. You have bought an expensive iPod.
You can check this yourself before paying. Ask the seller for the IMEI (dial *#06# on the phone, or find it in the settings), then run it through a status checker. In Australia, the industry runs lost and stolen checks through the AMTA; in the UK, services like CheckMEND cover the same ground; in the US, carriers and the CTIA maintain stolen-device databases. A genuine seller has no reason to hide an IMEI. A refusal to provide one, or a sudden vagueness when you ask, is a meaningful signal on its own.
Empty boxes, counterfeits and "I can't show you right now"
The third cluster is misrepresentation, and it covers a few moves.
Counterfeits are common with smaller, harder-to-verify items: AirPods, smartwatches, chargers and accessories, where a convincing fake costs the scammer very little. Refurbished units get sold as new. A laptop arrives with a cracked board or a swapped-out part. And then there is the classic non-delivery version, where the item simply does not exist; the seller is posting copied photos, will only do "postage, no pickup," and disappears once the money clears.
A reverse image search on the listing photos catches a surprising amount of this, because fake listings reuse images that appear elsewhere online. (We covered that 30-second check in an earlier post, and it applies directly here.) The other tell is any reason you are given for why you cannot see the item working: it is "packed away," the seller is "interstate," the battery is "flat right now." A working device can be demonstrated. One that cannot, for a reason that always seems to land just before payment, is a device you should assume has a problem.
The checks that actually protect you
Electronics reward a short, specific verification routine. Before you pay for any used device, you want clean answers to a handful of questions:
- Can I see it powered on, reset, and walked through to the home screen, with no account lock?
- Has the seller given me the IMEI or serial, and does it come back clean on a status check?
- Do the listing photos appear anywhere else online?
- Is the price plausible for the actual condition, or suspiciously below market?
- Am I being pushed toward postage-only, or pressured to pay before I can inspect?
Two of those answers turning up wrong is usually enough to walk away.
The payment method matters just as much as the device. Meeting in person and paying once you have verified the phone is the strongest position. Where a deal moves to bank transfer, PayID or Zelle before you have seen the item, you have removed your own protection; those payments are fast and effectively irreversible, which is precisely why scammers prefer them. If a seller will not meet, will not demonstrate the device, and only wants an instant transfer, the deal is the problem, not your caution. (More on which payment routes actually leave you covered in our buyer protection post.)
What to do before you pay
A bargain on electronics is only a bargain if the item is real, working, and yours to keep once the money moves. The three checks that catch most problems take a few minutes between them: reset the device in person, run the IMEI, and reverse image search the photos.
This is exactly the kind of situation Chekka is being built for: the moment before you pay, when the listing looks fine, the seller sounds reasonable, and you are trying to work out whether the discount is luck or bait. 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 ask for before you commit.
We are shaping the MVP around real buying and selling experiences right now, and your input genuinely changes what gets built first. If you have ever bought or sold a phone, laptop or console online, the survey takes about five minutes.
Survey: https://bit.ly/4xMOg7Z