"Digital Property Scams to Avoid: A Guide for Buyers and Sellers"
Digital property scams follow familiar patterns: fake payment proof, chargebacks, phishing. Here's how each one works and how escrow stops it.
Most digital property scams aren't clever. They're the same handful of tricks, repeated with small variations, aimed at both buyers and sellers. Knowing the pattern is most of the defense — the rest comes from a deal structure that removes the incentive to try.
Fake proof of payment
A common scam targets sellers: the buyer sends a screenshot or PDF that looks like a payment confirmation, then asks the seller to transfer the account, domain, or store immediately, before the money actually clears. By the time the seller realizes no payment arrived, the buyer — and the asset — are gone. The fix isn't learning to spot a fake screenshot faster; it's never releasing anything based on a screenshot. Payment should be confirmed by the platform holding the funds, not by an image sent in chat.
Chargebacks after the handover
This one runs the other direction. A buyer pays with a method that allows a chargeback, receives the account or domain, then disputes the charge with their bank or card issuer after the transfer is already complete. The seller is left with neither the asset nor the money. It's a large part of why serious escrow-based marketplaces avoid card payments for this category altogether — a chargeback that happens after delivery has no clean remedy once the asset has changed hands.
Phishing and credential requests
Both sides get targeted here. A "buyer" asks the seller to log into the account together over screen share, or asks for a temporary password sent by chat "just to check something." A "seller" sends a link to a fake login page instead of the platform's real recovery flow. Neither of these has a legitimate reason to exist inside an escrow transaction — access should move through the transfer method the two parties agreed on and documented, carefully, once the payment is confirmed, not through shared passwords or third-party links.
"Let's finish this off-platform" — the biggest red flag
The single most consistent thread across digital property scams is a request to move the conversation and the payment somewhere else — a different messaging app, a different payment method, "to save on fees." Once a deal moves off-platform, there's no contract, no chat record, and no one to review a dispute if something goes wrong. Any request to leave the platform mid-negotiation is worth treating as a warning sign on its own, regardless of how reasonable the stated reason sounds.
How escrow defends against digital property scams
Every one of these scams depends on one side acting on trust before the other side has actually delivered. An escrow structure removes that gap: the buyer's payment is held by the platform, not sent to the seller directly; the seller only transfers the asset once the payment is confirmed as held; and the buyer has a fixed inspection window (7 days for every asset type) to confirm everything matches the listing before the funds are released. If something doesn't match, a dispute is reviewed by a person, based on what's actually written in the contract's chat — which is also why it's worth documenting agreements there rather than elsewhere.
None of this makes a deal risk-free — no structure does. But it removes the specific moment each of these scams is built around: the point where one side has to hand something over before knowing the other side already has too.
If you're buying or selling a digital property, you can browse current listings at /en/ativos, see how escrow works on the escrow explainer, or start your own listing at /en/vender.