A young Gold Coast man says he was scammed out of $900 in a cash deal gone wrong, with “obviously fake” notes handed over from the buyer before he had time to realise. With an uptick in counterfeit cash being used around the nation, Cooper Williams is warning other Australians not to make the same careless mistake he did.
Williams was selling an old iPhone on Facebook Marketplace and found a keen buyer to meet with last Friday, September 18. When handed the nine $100 notes, the 26-year-old didn’t consider doing a proper check of the money’s legitimacy.
“It wasn’t until later that day when I was back home and properly looked at the cash that I realised how obviously fake the notes were,” he tells Yahoo Finance.
RELATED
The exchange only took around 15 minutes, and looking back, there were some “red flags”, Williams says.
These included strange excuses as to why the buyer was late, their need to “get more phone credit”, and the request to meet them at a nearby soccer oval instead of the pre-agreed upon location.
“But at the time, I gave them the benefit of the doubt… I generally tend to trust people and I didn’t think I was being set up for a scam,” he says.
It wasn’t until later in the day when Williams and a friend went to use the cash to make a purchase that he realised the money was “outrageously fake”.
He immediately tried to contact the buyer via Facebook Marketplace, but had already been blocked by the account.
While Williams hasn’t yet reported the theft to the police and acknowledges he realistically won’t get the phone back, he does intend to report the incident and hand the counterfeit cash over to the authorities.
“Even if I don’t recover the phone, I want to provide the information and fake notes in case it can help prevent the same thing happening to someone else,” he told Yahoo.
Upon posting about the exchange on social media, Williams’ video has now been shared nearly a thousand times as he urges other Australians to “avoid making the same mistake” that he did.
“My main motivation was to give other people a heads-up that counterfeit cash like this is circulating and can be used in Marketplace transactions.
“It genuinely wasn’t something I had ever really considered happening to me,” he says.
Marketplace sellers, small businesses see increase in counterfeit cash
Story continues
Williams isn’t the only seller on Marketplace to report this kind of scam.
In June, Melbourne mum Yelana Silulu told Yahoo Finance how she was fleeced out of $400 when selling a bed on the online platform.
When the buyer paid in cash using four $100 bills, Silulu didn’t realise until the next morning they were fake.
Silulu was able to contact the buyer and confront them about the inauthenticity of the notes, but he claimed he had no idea that they weren’t real and promised to PayID her for the bed. But instead, he blocked her on Facebook.
Yelana Silulu was given four fake $100 notes when she went to sell a bed on Facebook Marketplace. · Supplied
It’s not just online sellers being urged to be careful in their transactions. In January, a Queensland fish and chip shop owner received a fake $50 note for the first time in his 20 years of business.
Tan Minh Phan, the owner of Tan’s Seafood in Deception Bay, told Yahoo Finance that you could feel the plastic when you touched the bill.
Fake cash had been circulating in the community at the time, with a local petrol station and IGA also reporting fake currency in the months leading up to Phan’s experience.
Border force seizes millions in fake currency
In data provided to the ABC recently, the Australian Border Force (ABF) showed it had found 57 packages containing $191,130 in fake cash in the first six weeks of this year alone.
By March, more than $2.5 million in counterfeit money had been detected in more than 330 packages since the start of 2025.
ABF Assistant Commissioner for Customs, Compliance and Enforcement Tony Smith said a further increase in counterfeit notes was expected throughout the year.
For online sellers or small business owners, the RBA says the quickest way to tell if a note is real is by the feel of it.
State police across the country are warning Australians to look out for counterfeit cash. · Queensland Police
“A suspect banknote may feel excessively thick or thin compared to a genuine banknote,” the RBA says.
“It is difficult to start a tear along the edge of a genuine banknote. You can also try scrunching the banknote in your hand – a genuine banknote should spring back.”
If you do suspect its counterfeit, the AFP says to handle it as little as possible, store it in an envelope, then record the details of how you received it and take it to your local police to lodge a report.
Counterfeit cash is just one of the ways Australians are being tricked out of their hard-earned money, with 124,327 scams being reported to the National Anti-Scam Centre so far this year.
The National Anti-Scam Centre primarily reports on online, electronic, investment, and identity-based consumer scams – rather than counterfeit cash scams – which means the total number of instances where Australians have been conned out of their money may be much higher.
Get the latest Yahoo Finance news – follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.