Safety Tips When Using ArabiBay

We believe that the majority of people are good human beings who act decently. However, there are unscrupulous people in all walks of life and the internet is no different. At ArabiBay we treat every instance of fraud, abuse or spam extremely seriously and do our very best to protect our users and make your visit to ArabiBay safe and enjoyable. But we also encourage you to be on your guard and so, to help you stay safe, we have pulled together some key information on things to watch out for and some top tips.

Buying & Selling – top tips for staying safe

When buying or selling, you should meet in-person to see the item and exchange money. The purpose of the ArabiBay “Items For Sale” category is to encourage face-to-face, local, trading. For personal ease and safety, always ensure you take someone with you.
Never send your item before receiving the money
Never send or wire money to sellers or buyers. This includes never mailing a cheque or using payment services like Bidpay, Western Union or Money Gram to pay for items found on ArabiBay. We believe that these forms of funds transfer are favoured by fraudsters.
ArabiBay doesn’t offer any sort of buyer protection / payment programs. Any emails you receive that talk about such systems are scams, even if they may have the ArabiBay logo. If you receive any emails promoting these services, please report it to us.
Please also take special care when buying expensive items like mobile phones, laptops, plasma TVs, airline tickets, etc. When buying airline tickets we suggest you take the seller's name and ticket number, check the ticket exists and take responsibility yourself for changing the names.
Never provide your personal or banking information (e.g. credit card number) to others over the Internet.
Report any attempted fraud or suspicious emails, adverts, or other activity by community members to us.
Use common sense. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Accommodation – top tips for staying safe

View properties in person. ArabiBay is a local community site and we encourage face-to-face, local, trading. People willing to rent a property without seeing it / or the prospective tenant first, even if they claim that it is because they are currently overseas, are unlikely to be legitimate. For personal ease and safety, always ensure you take someone with you, or if you are inviting someone into your home ask to see personal identification first.
Never send or wire money to landlords. This includes never mailing a cheque or using payment services like Bidpay, Western Union or Money Gram to pay for items found on ArabiBay. We believe that these forms of funds transfer are favoured by fraudsters.
ArabiBay doesn’t offer any sort of buyer protection / payment programs. Any emails that talk about such systems are scams, even if they may have the ArabiBay logo. If you receive any emails promoting these services, please report it to us .
Never provide your personal or banking information (e.g. credit card number) to others over the Internet.
Make yourself aware of common scams and fraud - see our 'Scams' section. Do not believe the promise of large sums of money for your help in any task.
Report any attempted fraud or suspicious emails, adverts, or other activity by community members to us.
Use common sense. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Jobs – top tips for staying safe

You should find out as much as you can about the company from independent resources before taking up a position. If you are an employer, follow up on references and check on their authenticity.
Meet your prospective employers / employees face to face.
You should NOT have to provide your bank account details when applying for a job (this should only be once you have accepted an offer and started with the company). If any jobs ask you for them, please report the adverts to ArabiBay.
Unfortunately some scammers do target job seekers so please make yourself aware of the common scams out there by looking at our scam section. All the usual common sense rules apply - if it looks too good to be true it probably is!

Scam Watch

There are some dodgy people out there, and despite our efforts to keep them from ArabiBay and protect you, occasionally a bogus advert or buyer slips through. Read here for some common scams on the net to watch out for

Brand name spoofing / phishing: You get an email that claims to be from ArabiBay, Western Union, a bank, or another company and offers buyer protection or an online payment system or perhaps a cash prize. These emails will typically request that you send money or provide personal information. Any emails which combine urgency with some need for personal details should be treated with caution, no matter whom they purport to be from. ArabiBay and most other companies will never send out such emails. If you send money via these sites you are likely sending money to the fraudsters.

If you receive an email alleging to be from a company offering a service then go directly to the company’s official website and look for details of the service.
Cheque overpayment: A buyer or seller or prospective tenant will send you a cheque worth more than the value of the items / rent and then ask for the surplus money to be returned to them or a third party, for example “to pay for shipping”. The cheque will clear into your bank, only to be stopped / refused weeks later. At this point, the banks / building societies will take the full cheque amount back out of your account. Not only will you have lost the goods, you will be out of pocket for the amount of the cheque and the amount you passed on as the difference.
Payment for brokerage / importing: A seller claims that there are brokerage fees, import duties, or other such fees required to get an item into the country. Do not pay such fees, as you will most often never get the product and will have lost any money you paid. Again, ArabiBay is designed for local, face to face trading.
Fake escrow sites: A buyer or seller or prospective tenant / landlord suggests using an escrow service to complete the transaction. Often these escrow web sites are run by fraudsters (even though they may look "official") and they will take your money and never send you the product.
Work from home: Many work from home offers are "pyramid schemes" which require you to recruit other members in order to get paid. For example, an advert may say that you can make £100 an hour by stuffing envelopes. But to make that money, you need to sell the system to others. Other work from home opportunities are fronts for money laundering – a key warning sign is if the 'job' involves you receiving cheques and cashing them.
'419 Scams': You get an email saying that your help is needed to take money out of a country and that you will be paid a commission for your help. Eventually they will ask you for money to help them take the large amount of money out of the country and, once you pay, you will never hear from them again.

Abuse/ harassment

We don’t tolerate harassment or abuse of our ArabiBay users and take reports of this nature very seriously. If you have experienced abuse or harassment in connection to either an advert on ArabiBay or an email received from a ArabiBay user then please report it to us.

If you have received an abusive email you might also want to forward the details of the abusive email to the sender's email account provider (i.e., Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, Gmail).

Someone has posted an advert on ArabiBay with my details

There could be several common reasons for this, including simply human error. This occasionally happens when a poster mistypes a phone number / email address in their advert. This occurs mostly in newspapers when posters misquote their phone numbers when placing classified adverts over the telephone and sometimes happens on the internet too.

Please report the advert to us and we will remove it immediately.

I have never posted an advert on ArabiBay but I am receiving phone calls / emails?

There could be several reasons for this, including simply human error. This occasionally happens when a poster mistypes a phone number / email address in their advert. This occurs mostly in newspapers when posters misquote their phone numbers when placing classified adverts over the telephone and sometimes happens on the internet too.

Please report the problem to us and we will remove it immediately.

I have been sent the password for my advert. I did not request this, so why have I got it?

Somebody else has entered your email address to request the password to your account. They may have done this accidentally, so do not worry. We’d only email the password to the contact given at registration – no one else.

I have received a spam email in connection to my advert on ArabiBay

If you have received a spam email in connection to your advert on ArabiBay then please report it to us so that we can try and stop these people from emailing ArabiBay users again.