I’ve been scammed. I feel quite embarrassed to admit that because I am a tech savvy, 32-year-old who wouldn’t think a scam would work on me. I was wrong. Here is the story of how I lost 400 euros via a OLX.pt / MBWay scam.
I bought a new couch for my living room and it arrived unexpectedly early! This left me with two couches and a fairly small living room so I thought to myself, let’s try this Portuguese marketplace I’ve heard about – OLX.pt.
I took some nice pictures of my couch and measured the dimensions to create the ad on OLX.pt. I created an account, added the pictures, and set up the ad. It was a simple and easy process. When putting the ad together, it does ask to add your phone number so I added my Portuguese number. I paid for the higher priority listing, which cost 18 euros, and it was live.
Within a minute or so, I started to receive many phone calls from Portuguese men inquiring about the couch. They only spoke in Portuguese and tended to talk quite quickly. My naive and positive self thought, “Wow – I should have posted this couch for more money since there is so much quick interest!”. The first guy got frustrated and hung up on me, and then another number called and started to talk to me again, in Portuguese, and had a friendly tone.
I have been taking Portuguese lessons for many months now, so my general comprehension is basic so I did my best to converse with this man in my broken Portuguese. I felt guilty for not speaking a higher level of Portuguese and pushed myself to try to understand this conversation. The man continued to ask me in Portuguese “do you have MBWay?”.
MBWay is a payment app that is used in Portugal to be able to send money using your phone number. I have used MBWay for many months now, but to be honest, wasn’t super familiar with all the buttons. The app is also in Portuguese.
I stayed on the phone with this man for 30 minutes and thought that he was walking me through the steps of how I can REQUEST money from him. This was my downfall and naivety. There is a button on the MBWay app called “Utilizar MULTIBANCO”. As a MBWay user, I thought this button would allow me to request money from this man on the phone so I sent a request to him for 200 euros and then I typed in his phone number and it sends him a code to a phone number.
What that button actually does is give the man a code that they can use at any MULTIBANCO ATM. They put in the unique code into the ATM and allows them to take out money from your account. When the third code didn’t work, he hung up on me after 30 minutes and I cancelled the code.
At this time, I still didn’t know I had been scammed because in the MBWay app, it doesn’t put a negative sign in front the amount, so it does look like a request instead of a withdrawal amount, which is a very bad user experience (especially when the app is in a different language!).
I walked to my favourite cafe, Baoba, and the girls there spoke Portuguese to help me. I asked them to help me call the man back because I wanted to know when he was going to pick up the couch. The girls told me to check my actual bank account to see if the money was coming in or going out. And that was the moment I realized I was the target of this scam.
I felt so angry, ashamed, and embarrassed!! I believe the best in people and honestly thought this man wanted to buy the couch. I started to cry in the coffee shop, and all the women who worked there helped me to call the bank and see if they could reverse the charges. I learned that because MBWAY generated a unique code with that button, the man could have been anywhere in Portugal and used it at any ATM, which makes the withdrawal impossible to track.
What I learned from this experience is:
- No one wants your couch that badly after posting it for less than 1 minute on a buy/sell platform
- Ideally don’t post your phone number on the internet with buy/sell ads
- Don’t let men who speak a different language make you believe they are helping you walk through your payment app without doing due diligence first
Being a foreigner comes with challenges, and this was a good lesson again that it is important to learn the local language. I am even more motivated to keep practicing my Portuguese now that I’ve had this experience. I hope this story helps others avoid situations like this in the future.
