Important Safety Tips
Sell your dress faster - and safer!
While most individuals who use Sell My Wedding Dress have success with buying & selling their wedding dresses, we do occasionally receive reports of people attempting to scam or defraud others.
We try to keep the website as accessible as possible to ensure that all potential buyers & sellers find it easy to meet and communicate – but this comes at the cost of making it easy for fraudsters to contact our sellers too.
Below are our recommended tips that will aid in keeping you safe when selling your dress on our platform:
Meeting your buyer
- We recommend that you meet with the buyer if possible, as most fraudsters avoid physical effort and prefer to only operate digitally.
- If the potential buyer agrees to meet with you, make sure that you suggest some place safe to meet – preferably in public & during daytime. NEVER meet the potential buyer at their own location – YOU are the seller, YOU get to choose where to meet.
- Try your best to have a friend or family member join you when meeting the buyer.
- If you have to let buyer into your home to fit the dress, make sure you have a family member present. Make prearrangements and confirm with the buyer on how many people they plan on bringing along to your home for the fitting. We would recommend that the buyer come alone, or bring a maximum of one other person along. If the buyer does not honour the arrangements made upon arrival, DO NOT let them into your home.
Payments
- Dealing with cash is still the safest option since fraudsters are adept at forging false payment receipts or banking documents. Urge the buyer to bring cash when discussing where you will meet.
- Be wary of ANY documents that claim to prove that a payment was made using Paypal, MoneyGram, Bidpay or Western Union – these documents are easily forged.
- If the buyer feels uncomfortable dealing with large sums of cash, have them pay you via EFT while you are present during your meet. Do not hand over the dress before the money has reflected in your bank account.
Personal information
NEVER share any of your personal information. The buyer does not need sensitive information like your ID number, credit card number, etc.. Only give them your home address if you feel safe and comfortable with the buyer and once you have agreed to arranging a fitting at your home.
Look up your buyer
- Try to confirm your buyers identity, especially if you sense something “off”. If your buyer has a profile on Facebook, have them send you a personal message on the platform so that you can see if their Facebook profile matches the typical buyer person that would be interested in buying a dress.
- If they have provided you with their phone number, type the number into the Truecaller app to see if it matches with the name that they’ve given you.
Keep in mind
- If the deal looks too good to be true, it probably is! Trust your instincts and if you sense anything “off” with the deal, ask your family or friends for advice.
Typical scams & general tips
- Scammers and fraudsters will usually always immediately agree with your initial price and accompany their reasoning with something like “I am very happy with the condition of the dress”. Most honest buyers will try to persuade you to lower your asking price for the dress.
- Some scammers send forged documents that claim that they have paid too much and that you should send them the extra money back OR ask you to use the extra money to pay a courier agent that will deliver the dress to the buyer.
- Scammers will typically make a couple of typing/grammatical errors in the documents that they forge which is an easy way to tell whether the documents are legit or not.
- The forged documents will sometimes contain irrelevant information that makes no sense, for example: a Paypal receipt that also instructs you on what actions you have to take to get the money or which third party courier company you have to pay.
If you are certain that a potential buyer might be a fraudster, please contact us at office@bigbridalpopup.co.za so that we can investigate and see if we can block the user from potentially scamming other sellers on the website.