Cooper Williams was the victim of a counterfeit cash scam, which have become more and more common around Australia.
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.
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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 buyercount
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.
