The Venmo scammer-Facebook Marketplace

Venmo, a payment system which uses mobile devices, has either a personal or business account. Most people have a personal account, and as such, are required to use it for personal dealings with friends or peers. But when a fraud ring in LA managed to steal $50,000 worth of product on Facebook Marketplace, the terms of Venmo ended up working against its users.

A photographer named Rasa had listed a camera on Facebook Marketplace and was contacted by a buyer. The camera was listed at $1200. The buyer paid Rasa the full amount, but in 52 separate Venmo transactions. Rasa thought it was weird, but since he had all the money, he let the camera go.

A day later, Venmo froze Rasa’s account and took back all that money. It had violated their terms and was also found to be from stolen cards and accounts. In this situation, Rasa had no recourse with Venmo to get the money back, and lost the camera as well.


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Domain: dropbox.com

Established: 1995-06-28

Server IP Address: 205.251.193.59

Domain Blacklisted: No

In computing, a blacklist, disallowlist, blocklist, or denylist is a basic access control mechanism that allows through all elements (email addresses, users, …)

Suspended Site: No

When your website account is suspended, it means the hosting provider has temporarily taken it offline. Website hosts often suspend websites for a myriad of reasons ranging from malware to spam.

Email (MX) Configured: Yes

Verification that the website has its entity’s proper IMAP (Inbox) and SMTP (Outbox) mailbox servers configured correctly.

DMARC Configured: Yes

DMARC is an open email authentication protocol that provides domain-level protection of the email channel. DMARC authentication detects and prevents email spoofing techniques used in phishing, business email compromise (BEC), and other email-based attacks.

SSL Cert Blacklisted: No

Hackers have discovered ways to circumvent, alter, or abuse SSL certificates. An SSL certificate blacklist is a list of untrustworthy SSL certificates that have been created and can potentially harm users.

Website Popular: No

Risky TLD: No

The TLD (Top Level Domain) are the last characters of an entity’s website name, such as .com, .org, etc. Cyber-criminals and threat actors prefer a small set of 25 out of the thousands of available extensions, which accounts for 90% of all malicious sites. A Risky TLD is verification that the domain name is not to be trusted.

Heuristic Pattern: No

If a website uses Heuristics, then it is a scanning method that looks for malware-like behavior patterns. It is commonly used to detect new or not-yet-known malware.

Risky Geolocation: No

Verification to an entity’s geolocation status being labeled as ‘Risky’.

Suspicious Domain: No

Verification the entity’s domain is not listed as being “Suspicious”.