In the United States, MoneyPaks are reloadable debit cards, sold in stores, used to make same-day payments or add money to prepaid cards or PayPal accounts. Great convenient tools, in other words.

However, they became very popular amongst scammers, who are slowly moving away from payments through wire transfer.

The most common MoneyPak scams occur when purchasing stuff on sites like Craigslist or Kijiji. Whatever item they are “selling”, - computers or even land, scammers solicit payments via MoneyPak, persuading the victims to load money into their MoneyPak card and then to send along the serial number. If you do that, your card will be emptied almost instantaneously.

The trick here is that the scammers will come up with a good reason for requesting the payment like that: “I just got my wallet stolen and had to cancel all my accounts, sorry for the inconvenience”.

How to avoid: if the transaction is local (and you should only do local when selling on Craigslist), always ask for cash. If it is through paypal, tell the buyer he can pick up the item as soon as you have accepted the Paypal payment, and not before.