An Auckland man has been arrested after allegedly pocketing over $13,000 through Facebook Marketplace scams he carried out “on a daily basis”. <\/p>\n
The man allegedly took payments for items like electronics, fishing reels, sports merchandise, music equipment, Lego, and Pok\u00e9mon cards. <\/p>\n
Police then received “multiple complaints” about a user who had failed to send items to buyers. <\/p>\n
Described as a “serial scammer”, police said the man swindled over $13,700 through his scams. <\/p>\n
“Enquiries revealed that between February and August of this year, the offender had been defrauding victims through Facebook Marketplace on a daily basis,” Acting Detective Senior Sergeant James Kim said. <\/p>\n
“He operated under multiple identities, and his fraudulent activity spanned the North Island.” <\/p>\n
The 42-year-old was arrested following a raid at an Arkles Bay address yesterday. <\/p>\n
He was charged with 22 counts of obtains by deception; failing to comply with obligations relating to a computer search; possession of cannabis utensils; possession of methamphetamine utensils; injuring with intent to injure; and two counts of contravening a protection order.<\/p>\n
He was remanded in custody and was scheduled to reappear in the North Shore District Court in January 2027.<\/p>\n
Kim urged users of buy-and-sell platforms like Facebook Marketplace to be careful. <\/p>\n
\u201cThese sites are a hunting ground for criminals to buy items using a fake bank transfer or sell items that don\u2019t exist,” he said. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe are urging those who use these platforms to do their due diligence and not exchange any money without first examining the product.<\/p>\n
“Police encourage consumers to only purchase items from trusted retailers or, when purchasing off TradeMe, using the PING payment method which provides buyers with some protections.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An Auckland man has been arrested after allegedly pocketing over $13,000 through Facebook Marketplace scams he carried out…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":587830,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[51,67,42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-587829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-auckland","tag-crime-and-justice","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=587829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587829\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/587830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=587829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=587829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=587829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}