Is a buyer asking me to accept a refund or return outside the marketplace a scam?

Marketplace refund fraud targets sellers on platforms such as eBay, Vinted, Depop, Facebook Marketplace, and Etsy. The buyer claims the item is faulty, then suggests settling the refund directly by bank transfer 'to avoid the platform's slow process'. Once you send money, the buyer either keeps the item and the refund, or never had the item in the first place. A variation involves the buyer sending a counterfeit return (an empty box or a different item) and demanding a refund before you can inspect it. Another version uses fake platform emails claiming you must issue a refund via a payment link. Always process refunds and disputes through the platform's official system, no matter how convincing the buyer's story sounds. This preserves your seller protections and leaves an audit trail.

The psychology aims at your reasonableness. Most sellers want to be helpful, fear negative feedback, and find dispute processes tedious — so a buyer offering a 'simpler' direct settlement is pushing at an open door. Some scripts add menace instead: threats of public one-star reviews, chargebacks, or reports to the platform unless you refund immediately outside the system. Both pressure styles have the same purpose, moving the money somewhere the platform cannot see, because inside the dispute system the buyer's claims would have to survive evidence.

Evidence is your side of the bargain, so build it routinely: photograph items during packing, keep proof of postage with weights where possible, and photograph returned parcels before opening them on camera if a dispute is already live — an empty-box return documented this way is winnable, undocumented it rarely is. Respond to every claim inside the platform's messaging so the record stays complete, and let the dispute process run even when it is slow. Sellers lose these situations at the moment they step outside the system, almost never before.