Investigation
Australians lost $2.18 billion to scams last year. More of us were caught buying and selling online than any other way.
Bank transfer, no chargeback, and almost no consumer guarantee. The national data shows exactly where peer to peer trading breaks down, and the fix is not another warning poster.
Every warning Australians get about online scams tells them to be careful. Check the profile. Do not send a deposit. Meet in a public place. It is sound advice, and the numbers say it is not working.
In March 2026 the National Anti-Scam Centre released its annual Targeting Scams report. Across 2025, Australians reported $2.18 billion in scam losses from 481,523 reports, with 274,577 of those reports involving actual money lost. Losses rose 7.8% on 2024, although they remain 29.7% below the 2022 peak of $3.1 billion.
Investment scams took the most money, $837.7 million of it. But dollars lost and people harmed are two different measures, and on the second one the picture changes completely.
“More Australians reported a financial loss to shopping scams compared to any other scam type in 2025.”
National Anti-Scam Centre, Targeting Scams report, March 2026
Read that again, because it is the story. Not the biggest dollar figure, the biggest number of people. Buying and selling is where ordinary Australians actually get hurt, and it is the category almost nobody legislates for.
It is also badly undercounted. Scamwatch only sees the people who report. Very few people who lose $180 on a set of golf clubs or $600 on a pram sit down and fill in a government form. The real figure is a multiple of the published one, and everyone working in this area knows it.
Why buying and selling is the weakest link, structurally
This is not bad luck or careless buyers. Peer to peer trading in Australia has three specific structural gaps, and all three are documented.
1. The payment method has no reverse gear
Bank transfer remains the payment method scammers request most often. In 2025 it accounted for 8,858 reports with a loss, totalling $118.1 million. A bank transfer is not a card payment. There is no chargeback, no dispute button, no issuer to appeal to. Once the money lands in the other account, recovery depends entirely on the receiving bank freezing funds before they move again, which is usually a matter of minutes.
Every free classifieds site in the country introduces two strangers and then steps aside at precisely the moment money changes hands. The platform hosts the ad. It does not hold the payment.
2. Australian Consumer Law barely covers you
Most people assume the ACL has their back. For private sales it largely does not. The ACCC is explicit: most consumer guarantees do not apply to private sales between two people where the seller is not running a business. Three narrow guarantees survive, covering clear title, undisturbed possession, and no hidden debts or charges over the goods.
What does not survive is everything buyers actually care about. No guarantee of acceptable quality. No guarantee it is fit for purpose. No guarantee it matches the description. If a private seller posts you a phone that does not work, the ACL is not the tool that gets your money back.
3. The new scam laws do not reach marketplaces
The Scams Prevention Framework Act 2025 passed Parliament in February 2025 and is the most significant anti-scam reform Australia has enacted. The SPF Rules commence on 1 September 2026, with sector code obligations applying from 31 March 2027, and penalties reaching $50 million per contravention for the most serious breaches.
The first tranche designates three sectors: banks, telecommunications providers, and large digital platforms covering social media, search engines and instant messaging. Online marketplaces are not designated. Neither are app stores or email services.
So a social media company’s messaging service falls inside the framework while the classifieds transaction happening on the same app largely does not. That gap is where most of the 12,248 people lost their money.
What this looks like at a kitchen table
In April 2026, Leanne Roney of Port Sorell in Tasmania bought a Fiat Ducato van through Facebook Marketplace for $9,000. She spent another $1,000 on registration and upgrades.
Two days later she found out the van was not the seller’s to sell. It had been leased to him under a rent to buy agreement with Asset Rental Group, and he had listed it anyway. The vehicle went back to its owner.
The seller, 41 year old Michael John Bowerman, pleaded guilty in June 2026 to dishonestly acquiring a financial advantage. He was ordered to pay $97 in costs. A restitution hearing was listed for 24 August 2026, filed only after ABC News contacted police about the case.
Roney is $10,000 down. The conviction is real, the money is gone, and no part of that process happened before she handed it over.
Reported by ABC News, 18 August 2026.
Cost of living is pushing more Australians into exactly this exposure
The ABS Selected Living Cost Indexes for the June 2026 quarter, released on 5 August 2026, show living costs rising 4.7% over the year for age pensioner households, 4.6% for pensioner and beneficiary households, and 3.7% for employee households. Housing, insurance and financial services, and food were the main contributors across every household type.
Australians have responded the way they always do, by trading with each other. Research released with Vinted’s Australian launch in August 2026 found 91% of Australians have bought or sold second hand at least once, and 88% have items at home they could resell. Of those trading, 42% named cost of living pressure as the driver and 31% were after additional income. More than half of sellers had increased their listings over the past year.
That is the part that should concern policymakers. The households with the least capacity to absorb a $400 loss are the ones being pushed hardest towards the least protected way to transact. Second hand trading is no longer a hobby economy. For a lot of families it is how the school shoes get paid for, and it is running on bank transfers and good faith.
The fix is not more warnings. It is holding the money.
Almost every scam in this category depends on one thing: the money and the goods moving at different times. The buyer pays first and hopes. Or the seller posts first and hopes. Whichever way round, somebody is exposed for a window, and that window is the entire business model of the person on the other end.
Close the window and most of these scams stop working. That is what escrow does, and it is why we built Gettit around it rather than bolting it on afterwards.
On Gettit, the buyer’s payment goes into secure escrow. It does not reach the seller when the deal is agreed. It releases when the buyer confirms the item arrived as described, or, for an in person handover, when the two people exchange a six digit code at the moment the goods change hands. No cash in a car park. No screenshot of a transfer that never happened.
Around that sit the rest of the controls:
- Buyer protection applies to every shipped order, with payment held until the item lands.
- Sellers are identity verified before a single payout is released, so accounts are tied to real people.
- A seller’s exact address never leaves our servers. Buyers see an approximate area only, which matters a great deal to the women and parents who make up a large share of preloved trading.
- Prepaid tracked Australia Post labels are generated inside the app under a commercial services agreement signed on 1 July 2026, so postage is not guessed, quoted or queued for.
- Local pickup is free, permanently. No fees, no commission.
None of that requires the user to be vigilant. That is the point. Asking consumers to out-think professional fraud operators has been the strategy for a decade, and 12,248 loss reports in a single year is the result.
What happened when we opened listings early
We opened listings on 1 August, three weeks ahead of the gate, with no advertising and no public launch. It was meant to be a quiet seeding period so the catalogue would not be empty on day one.
Sellers found it anyway. New listings have gone up every single day since, running several times ahead of what we forecast for a closed pre-launch window. We take that as a demand signal rather than a marketing win. People are looking for somewhere else to sell.
On the numbers, and why we are not publishing them yet
We are deliberately not publishing user or transaction figures before 31 August. Numbers from a closed pre-launch period tell you very little, and a marketplace that quotes them is usually doing so because it does not have anything better.
We will publish transaction volume, total value traded and our dispute rate 90 days after launch, and we will publish them whether they flatter us or not. A platform asking Australians to trust it with their money should be willing to be measured on how that goes.
Australian owned is not a slogan here, it is part of the mechanism
Small businesses account for 2,656,469 of Australia’s businesses, or 97.3% of the total, as at June 2025. A great many of them sell second hand or surplus stock online, and they carry the same exposure as households do, with more transactions to be exposed on.
Australians already say they want to back local. Roy Morgan research released in May 2025 found 84% of Australians are more likely to buy a product if it is Australian made, and 73% want to buy more locally to reduce reliance on imports. The harder question is whether the platform underneath the transaction is Australian too.
Gettit is an Australian company, based in Melbourne, with Australian bank accounts, Australian support staff and obligations under Australian law. If something goes wrong, the recourse is here, not an offshore help centre with no phone number and a 40 hour reply window across a time zone that does not overlap with yours.
Before your next private sale, on any platform
- Treat a bank transfer as cash. There is no chargeback and no dispute process once it lands.
- A screenshot is not a payment. Check the money is actually in your account, not just claimed to be sent.
- Be wary of any request to upgrade or verify a PayID to receive a payment. That is not how PayID works, and it is a common trick used on sellers.
- For anything with a title or registration, vehicles above all, run a PPSR check before money moves. It costs a few dollars and would have saved the Tasmanian buyer $10,000.
- Assume most consumer guarantees do not apply. If the seller is not a business, you have almost no post-sale rights.
- Prefer a platform that holds the payment until the goods are confirmed. If the platform steps out of the way at payment, you are the one carrying the risk.
- Report it either way. Scamwatch data is what drives disruption and policy, and under-reporting is why this category stays invisible.
Where this goes next
The Scams Prevention Framework is a genuine step forward, and the sectors it covers will be safer for it. But the framework’s own scope makes the point: marketplaces were left out of the first tranche, and marketplaces are where the largest number of Australians actually lose money.
That gap will close eventually, through regulation or through platforms choosing to close it themselves. We would rather not wait. Holding the payment until the goods arrive is not a complicated idea, and it does not need an Act of Parliament to implement. It just needs a platform willing to take responsibility for the moment the money moves, instead of hosting the ad and looking away.
Gettit launches nationally on 31 August 2026. The apps are live now on iOS and Android.
Fact box
Sources
- National Anti-Scam Centre, Targeting scams: report of the National Anti-Scam Centre on scams data and activity 2025, published 30 March 2026. nasc.gov.au
- ACCC, Continued action critical to combat fraud as annual scam losses exceed $2 billion, 30 March 2026. accc.gov.au
- ACCC Product Safety, Buy safe second-hand products online, on consumer guarantees in private sales. productsafety.gov.au
- Gilbert + Tobin, Click Here: Australia's Scam Prevention Framework takes shape, on designated sectors and commencement dates under the Scams Prevention Framework Act 2025 (Cth). gtlaw.com.au
- ABC News, Facebook Marketplace warning as woman loses $10k after accidentally buying stolen car, 18 August 2026. abc.net.au
- Australian Bureau of Statistics, Selected Living Cost Indexes, Australia, June 2026, released 5 August 2026. abs.gov.au
- Just Style, Vinted launches in Australia amid preloved shopping boom, 6 August 2026, citing Vinted's Australian consumer research. just-style.com
- Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, Number of small businesses in Australia, ABS Counts of Australian Business, June 2025. asbfeo.gov.au
- Roy Morgan, New research reveals appeal of Aussie Made, 23 May 2025. roymorgan.com
- ABC News, How to protect against scams when buying and selling online, 30 December 2025. abc.net.au