How to Check a Seller or Social Account Before You Buy

01Age and history beat follower count

Followers are purchasable and mean very little on their own. What is expensive to fake is a continuous history: an account that has existed for years and posted through them, with comments from accounts that themselves look real.

• A creation date that is weeks old on a shop claiming to be established.
• A large following with almost no engagement, or comments that are all generic and from accounts with no history of their own.
• A burst of posts uploaded on one day, backdated by nothing but their order.
• A recent name change, where the platform shows one. A recycled account with an unrelated past is not the same as a shop with a history.

02The photos are the fastest check you have

Reverse image search the product photos and the profile picture. It takes seconds and it is the check most likely to end the question outright, because stock listings and stolen photo sets are reused across many accounts at once.

What you are looking for is the same image under a different name, on a different platform, or on a real retailer's site. Photos that are all studio shots for a supposedly second-hand item are worth a look for the same reason.

03Watch where they want the conversation to go

A marketplace conversation is a record. It sits on a platform that can suspend an account, and on many platforms it is also the evidence a claim would be assessed on. Moving it to a private messaging app removes all of that, which is usually the reason for the move.

The request is rarely presented that way. It arrives as convenience, as a faster reply, or as a way to avoid the platform's fees — and that last one is worth reading carefully, because the fee being avoided is what pays for the protection being given up.

04And where they want the payment to go

This is the same signal that runs through every guide here, and it is the most reliable one. A seller who cannot compromise on being unrecoverable will steer you towards a method that is.

• A request to pay by bank transfer, or by a peer-to-peer app marked as a personal payment or a gift.
• A discount for paying outside the platform, framed as avoiding fees.
• A deposit to hold an item, before you have seen anything.
• A courier or shipping agent you have not heard of, who needs paying separately.
• An overpayment that you are asked to refund. See our guide on payment requests: the original payment is reversed later, the refund you sent is not.

05Read the reviews the account does not control

Comments under a seller's own posts are moderated by that seller. Ratings on the platform's own profile are harder to manipulate but not impossible, and a run of five-star ratings all left within a few days by accounts with no other activity is its own answer.

Search the handle and the shop name away from the platform. Where a seller has genuinely been trading for years, some trace of that usually exists somewhere they did not write.

06Check the handle against community reports

Record the exact handle, including punctuation and capitalisation, before you send anything. Display names change in seconds and are not the account; the handle is.

Check the payment identifier too, and treat that as the more informative of the two. Accounts are disposable and get replaced weekly; the account the money lands in is where the operation has something to lose.