A purchase scam takes payment for goods, tickets or animals that do not exist. The defining move is steering the buyer off a protected payment method — a card or platform checkout — and onto a bank transfer or a friends-and-family app payment. Purchase scams were 71% of all UK authorised push payment fraud cases in 2025.
Somebody sells you something that does not exist.
That is genuinely all of it, and the simplicity is why this scheme is both the most common fraud in most countries and the least written about. Tickets to a sold-out show. A games console at a good price. A puppy. A caravan. A sofa. Payment goes, the item does not arrive, and the seller stops replying.
The part worth understanding is not the lie about the item. It is the payment. Every version of this scam involves the same manoeuvre: getting the buyer off a payment method that carries protection and onto one that does not. The listing might be on a platform with buyer protection; the conversation moves to WhatsApp. The obvious payment is a card; the seller asks for a bank transfer, or a friends-and-family payment on an app, and gives a plausible-sounding reason about fees.
The scale is easy to miss because per-victim losses are modest. UK Finance recorded purchase scams as 71% of all authorised push payment fraud cases in 2025 — £118.1 million, up 20%. The FBI logged 56,478 non-payment complaints and $503 million. In Australia, more people reported losing money to shopping scams than to any other kind of scam.
Below market, but not absurdly so — an implausible bargain triggers suspicion. Scarcity does more work than price: a sold-out event, a hard-to-find console, a particular breed.
“Message me on WhatsApp.” “My account is playing up.” This is the move that matters, because the platform’s buyer protection, dispute process and fraud team all stay behind.
Someone else is interested. The event is tonight. The litter goes tomorrow. The seller rarely has to manufacture the pressure — the thing being sold already carries it.
Bank transfer, or friends-and-family on a payment app, with a reason: fees, a broken card reader, a platform holding funds too long.
Where it could have stopped
The payment rail is the entire scam. Cards can be charged back and platform checkouts are usually protected; bank transfers and friends-and-family app payments are neither. A seller who steers you off a protected rail has told you what this is, and the reason they give does not matter.
A tracking number that never progresses. A photograph of the item with today’s newspaper. A document. All of it buys days, and days are what push you past a dispute window.
The account is deleted or you are blocked. The same listing frequently reappears under a new name within hours.
The transaction is entirely ordinary. Buying a used item from a stranger online is a normal thing that works most of the time. Nothing about the situation is inherently suspicious.
Scarcity does the persuading. When something is genuinely hard to get, hesitation feels like the risk. The scheme rarely needs to invent pressure.
The payment request has a plausible cover story. “PayPal takes a fee” is true. “My card reader is broken” is possible. The request only looks like what it is once you know that removing the fee removes the protection.
Losses are small enough to absorb. A few hundred dollars is annoying rather than catastrophic, which means it often goes unreported and almost never investigated — a very comfortable position for the operator.
Accounts carry borrowed history. Compromised accounts with years of activity and real reviews are bought and sold. Profile age is not the reassurance people take it for.
And it scales trivially. One person can run dozens of listings. Being blocked costs nothing; another account appears immediately.
Purchase fraud is the most domestic scheme on this site. The seller is usually in the buyer’s own country, or presenting as such, because the story requires local collection or local delivery and a domestic bank account to receive the transfer.
That has two consequences. It is the category where police could most plausibly act, and least often do, because individual losses fall below the threshold at which anything gets investigated. And it is where mule accounts are most visible: the account receiving your transfer is frequently in a real person’s name — someone recruited through a fake job or paid for the use of their details.
Organised versions exist alongside the opportunistic ones. Fake shop networks — hundreds of convincing storefronts generated from templates, advertised through search and social media, and abandoned in batches — have been documented by consumer regulators in several countries, and Australia reports thousands of scam websites taken down in a single year.
On 1 September 2026 the FTC warned that scammers are cloning real car dealers' websites — often using AI — copying logos, vehicle listings and photographs in detail, then advertising uncommon vehicles and taking payment by wire. Buyers turn up at the real dealership to find no record of their order and no car.
The Better Business Bureau's 2025 puppy scam study update recorded 1,632 reports through September 2025 with a median loss of $600, following 2,278 reports in 2024 and 2,899 in 2023. Its most important figure is not a loss total: it estimates that only 4.8% of victims report the fraud to authorities at all. Analysis cited in the study placed 31% of scammers in Cameroon and 30% in South Africa.
US fake cheque scam reports to the FTC fell from 38,451 in 2022 to 13,616 in 2024, and FBI overpayment complaints fell from 4,144 in 2023 to 2,194 in 2025. Losses did not fall with them: FBI overpayment losses were higher in 2025 than in 2024. Cheques are fading as an instrument, but the overpayment mechanism they carried has moved onto other rails.
IC3 recorded 56,478 Non-Payment/Non-Delivery complaints and $503,373,587 in losses in 2025 — a category that holds concert tickets, puppies, construction materials and cars in the same number. It is the only current US figure that contains vehicle sale fraud, and it cannot tell you how much of it is vehicles.
Purchase scams are the highest-volume fraud in every national dataset that separates them, and they attract the least attention. UK Finance recorded purchase scams as 71% of all authorised push payment cases in 2025, with losses of £118.1 million. The FBI logged 56,478 non-payment and non-delivery complaints and $503.4 million. In Australia, more people reported losing money to shopping scams than to any other type.
UK Finance recorded £1.28 billion in total payment fraud losses in 2025, of which £576.4 million was authorised push payment fraud — money victims sent themselves after being deceived — across 248,070 cases. Impersonation fraud, the category containing the safe-account scam, was one of the few to fall, with losses down 12% and cases down 11%, while investment fraud rose 40%.
The FBI's IC3 recorded approximately 26,967 complaints and $54,032,396 in adjusted losses from fraudulent online vehicle sales between May 2014 and December 2017. The mechanism it describes is the one that still runs: a fake third-party buyer protection plan, an impersonated brand, and payment by gift card or wire for a vehicle that never arrives.
Before you pay. Pay by card, or through the platform’s own checkout, and accept the fee. If the seller refuses, walk away — the refusal is the information. For anything expensive, see it first, on a video call at minimum, and ask them to do something unpredictable with it while you watch.
If you have paid and the goods have not arrived.
If you are selling. The mirror-image scam is the overpayment: a buyer who pays too much and asks for the difference back. Take payment on the platform, wait for full clearance rather than “available funds”, and treat any transaction where money moves back out from you as a stop condition.
A transfer goes to an account in someone’s name at a real bank, and that account is very often a mule account — a real person recruited through a fake job, a romance, or a payment for the use of their details.
That is why the transfer feels safe. It is domestic, to a named individual, at a familiar bank, inside the normal payments system. It is also why the money is usually gone within hours: mule accounts are emptied fast, because the account holder knows the window is short.
Where a fake shop takes card payments instead, the money runs through a payment processor that will be abandoned once chargebacks accumulate — which is part of why regulators have started pursuing processors that onboard fraudulent merchants rather than only the merchants themselves.
The other half of this story
Our sibling site Clean on Paper explains why the seller’s account is in someone else’s name — how mule accounts are recruited, and why they are emptied within hours.
No agency publishes a line item for most of the schemes on this site, so these charts show the official categories that contain this scheme. Each series is labelled with the agency's own category name. See how the mapping works.
The payment method, and it is not close. A card payment can be charged back and a purchase through a platform's own checkout is usually protected. A bank transfer or a friends-and-family payment app transfer has neither. Any seller who steers you off a protected rail has told you what this is, whatever reason they give.
No. That is the most common single line in this scam. The fee exists because the payment carries buyer protection; removing the fee removes the protection, which is the point of the request rather than an incidental effect.
Tracking numbers are cheap. A scammer can post an empty envelope to a nearby address to generate real tracking, or supply a number for someone else's parcel entirely. A number that exists but never progresses to your address is a delay tactic, and delay is what pushes you past a dispute window.
Sometimes. In the UK, mandatory reimbursement rules for authorised push payment fraud apply and purchase scams are covered — do not accept a first refusal as final. Elsewhere it depends on how fast you report and whether funds remain. Call your bank the same day.
Accounts are stolen and resold precisely because history is convincing. A profile with years of activity may have been taken over last week. Check whether the reviews relate to the kind of item being sold and whether the account's activity changed abruptly.
No, and that assumption misleads people. Sophisticated listings are priced near market, because an absurd bargain triggers suspicion. Scarcity matters more than price: a sold-out event, a hard-to-find console, a specific breed.
Report it
Reporting is what produces the enforcement data on this page. Find the right agency and phone number for your country on the report page. If money moved in the last few hours, call your bank first.