How to Avoid Online Shopping Scams on Carousell and Other Marketplaces with Safe Payment Verification

Call the Singapore Police Force Anti-Scam Helpline at 1800-722-6688. Right now. Then call your bank's fraud hotline, the number on the back of your card, not one from the chat log, and ask them to flag the transfer for a possible stop-payment or trace. If you have already transferred money to a suspected scam seller on Carousell or another marketplace, your first action is a phone call, not a chat. Recovery is a salvage operation with no guarantee of success, so the urgent step comes before the lesson. The rest of this guide is about shopping habits that keep the money in your account in the first place.

Carousell is a Singapore company, and its own figures are part of the national problem. The Singapore Police Force Annual Scams and Cybercrime Brief 2024, published in February 2025, recorded 14,991 online shopping scam cases with at least S$21.3 million lost. Carousell was involved in 44.7% of those cases. The ScamShield Survey 2024 found that 65% of respondents encountered at least one online shopping scam, and Carousell was the most frequently mentioned platform. When a platform hosts nearly half of a crime category, treating that platform's default settings as safe is a choice, not a strategy.

Carousell's own response to the problem is Carousell Protection, an in-app payment system launched in 2021 that holds the money in escrow until the buyer confirms the item arrives as described. That is the only payment method you should accept or offer on the platform. The rule is absolute. If a seller asks you to pay outside Carousell Protection, via PayNow, bank transfer, or a link to a 'secure' page, the transaction has left the platform's safeguards and you have no recourse when the item never arrives and the seller deletes their account. The scam red flags Singapore police publish are built around exactly this pattern of off-platform redirection. Treat any request to leave the app as a confession.

Verification Bypass Is the First Trick

Carousell requires identity checks for sellers in selected high-risk categories, but the bypass is the scammer's first trick. A seller with a verified badge in a high-risk category can still redirect you off-platform. The badge proves a person exists, not that the person is honest.

Read the Profile Like a Detective

Check the seller's profile age and history. A profile created last week with three listings of brand-new electronics at half price is a pattern, not a coincidence. Click into the profile and look for the join date and the review history. A real seller has a digital footprint that extends backward. A scammer's profile is a fresh construction with no trail of completed transactions.

The first thing to do with any product photo is a reverse image search. Right-click the image and search with Google Images, or drag the file into TinEye or Yandex. If the same photo appears on a Russian retailer's site, an AliExpress listing, or ten other Carousell posts, the seller has stolen the image from somewhere else. This is not a sophisticated check. It takes thirty seconds and exposes the most common fabrication in the online shopping scam typology. Reverse image search is a lateral reading technique applied to images: you leave the listing and check the source of the evidence, rather than judging the photo on its resolution or lighting. A stolen image is not proof the seller is a scammer. It is proof the seller is a liar. Liars do not become honest at the payment step.

The second most common pattern after off-platform payment is the spoofed SMS or email that claims to be from Carousell confirming your payment via Carousell Protection. The message looks exactly like a legitimate confirmation because it is a copy of one, but the sender ID is faked and the link goes to a phishing page designed to harvest your bank credentials. The officialdom halo does the work here: the logo looks right, the language sounds official, and the urgency of a 'pending transaction' short-circuits your judgment.

The rule is to never click the link in any such message. Instead, open the Carousell app directly. Type the URL yourself. Do not use the link. Check the order status there. If the app does not show the payment, the payment did not happen. The ScamShield app filters scam SMSes and blocks scam calls using a known-scam database, and the ScamShield Bot at scamshield.gov.sg checks if a message, link, or phone number is a reported scam. Use both. The habit that protects you is the refusal to click through from a message claiming to be your bank or your marketplace.

Know the Typology

The scam typology used by the Singapore Police Force Anti-Scam Command, launched on 20 June 2022 as a centralised unit, includes phishing scams, impersonation scams, and online shopping scams as distinct categories. The police publish an advisory that lists the recurring patterns, and the National Crime Prevention Council's Scam Alert page repeats them with the council's ACT Against Scams campaign framing: Add, Check, Tell.

Spot the Family Resemblance

The typology matters because it shows you the family resemblance between a 'bank officer' phone call and a 'verified seller' on Carousell. Both are impersonation scams that rely on the same psychological lever: an authority figure, the bank, the platform, the government, demanding you act immediately. The police advisory is at police.gov.sg/Advisories/E-Commerce-Scams, and the ScamShield advisory at scamshield.gov.sg/scam-types/e-comerce-scams. Read both once, and you will recognise the pattern in your inbox within a week.

Report on the Platform

If the listing is gone by the time you look, or the seller has blocked you, or you are reading this at 1am and the police hotline is closed, the route is still open. The Carousell official scam reporting page is at carousell.sg/report-scam. Use it to report the listing and the chat.

Report to the Police

Then report the seller via the online report system on the police website. The hotline is a human voice, but the online form is available around the clock. Forward the suspicious SMS to your telco so they can block the sender ID. The ScamShield app runs in the background and will catch some of these messages before you see them.

Preserve the Evidence First

The failure case has a protocol, and the protocol starts with preserving evidence: screenshot the listing, the chat, the payment confirmation, and the seller's profile before you report. A police report initiates a legal process under Singapore law. A platform report flags content for removal under the platform's terms of service. They are not the same action, and you may need both.

Payment Method	Buyer Protection	What the Scammer Wants You to Use
Carousell Protection (in-app)	Escrow held until item received; full refund if item not delivered	Any off-platform transfer
PayNow to a 'friend'	None. Money is gone instantly; bank transfer is final	The exact transfer that cannot be reversed
Bank transfer via a 'secure' link	None. The link is a phishing page harvesting your credentials	The click that gives away your internet banking password
Credit card (on-platform only)	Chargeback rights under the bank's fraud policy	Reading you the card number over the phone

The too good to be true heuristic is the single most useful filter in this domain, and it is free. A brand-new iPhone at half the going rate on a marketplace is not a bargain. It is an advertisement for a scam. The emotional override that fires when you see a deal that undercuts every other listing is the signal, not the opportunity. The ScamShield Survey 2024 found that 65% of respondents had encountered an online shopping scam, and most of those encounters began with an offer the buyer wanted to believe. When a deal triggers excitement, the correct reaction is suspicion. Excitement is the emotion that reduces your checking behaviour. Recency bias works the same way: a scammer references a current event, a new iPhone release, a tax rebate, a government payout, and you lower your guard because you heard the news that morning. The reference to a current event does not make the offer legitimate. It makes the timing of the scam deliberate.

The verification bypass is the moment you almost escape the scam. You ask the seller for proof of legitimacy, and they send a screenshot of a Carousell Protection payment confirmation, a fake one, or a real one for a different transaction. You look at the screenshot, and the relief that the seller is 'legit' short-circuits your judgment. This is the failure mode: you asked for proof, you received a fabricated confirmation, and you accepted it as sufficient.

The habit that closes this gap is lateral reading applied to the confirmation itself. Do not look at the screenshot and judge it on its resemblance to the real thing. Instead, open the Carousell app on your phone and check the order status there. The app is the source of truth. The screenshot is a claim about the app. A screenshot is a piece of evidence you can check, not a verdict. If you cannot check it, the verification has failed. Walk away.

The Personal Data Protection Commission publishes an advisory on online shopping scams at pdpc.gov.sg/help-and-support/for-individuals/protecting-yourself-from-scams. The core of that advice is about your data, not your money. When a scammer has your name, NRIC, and address from a phishing form, they can impersonate you to your bank, your telco, or a government agency. The privacy preservation principle applies to your checking habits: uploading a suspicious image to a public reverse image search may reveal your identity or location through the image metadata, so crop the image before you search it.

The more important habit is to never enter your personal data into a form reached through a link in an email or SMS. The officialdom halo is strongest when the message claims to be from the police, the bank, or the platform, and the form asks for your login credentials. No legitimate organisation will ask for your password or your OTP through a link. The scams that succeed are the ones that get you to part with the data that lets them get to the money.

The ScamShield Survey 2024 found that 65% of respondents encountered an online shopping scam, and the police recorded 14,991 online shopping scam cases in 2024, which means the odds of meeting a scammer on Carousell in a single year are better than the odds of rolling a six on a standard die. The only rational response is to treat every single transaction on a marketplace as a potential fraud until the item is in your hands.