The Exact Messages Pokémon Card Scammers Send

If you are selling Pokémon cards and a message feels slightly wrong, it probably is — and it is probably one of about eight messages that get sent over and over. This page lists them by their actual wording, because that is how you meet them: a stranger says something odd, and you want to know what it means before you reply.

Each entry gives the message, what it is really asking for, and what to do. Where a platform’s own policy decides the outcome, it is quoted and linked, because the rules matter more than the folklore about them.

One rule covers most of this. Nothing a buyer says changes what protects you — only where the money moves and what evidence you kept. Every scam below is an attempt to move the payment somewhere with no protection, or to move you into shipping before the money is real.

“Send me the code so I know you’re a real seller”

This is the verification code scam, and it is the one people fall for hardest because it costs them nothing at the time. The buyer says they have been burned by fake listings and want to check you are a person. A code arrives by text. They ask you to read it back.

The code is not verifying you. It is a Google Voice sign-up code triggered against your phone number, and reading it out lets a stranger create a phone number attached to your identity, which they then use to defraud other people. The Federal Trade Commission describes the pattern and records the pitch almost word for word: “I’ve heard about fake online listings and want to verify that you’re a real person.”

The FTC’s advice has no exceptions in it: “Don’t share your Google Voice verification code — or any verification code — with someone if you didn’t contact them first. That’s a scam, every time.”

What to do: do not send the code. Do not send a screenshot of the code. There is no version of a card sale that requires one.

“I’ll send a little extra to cover shipping — just send the difference back”

This is overpayment, and the money you send back is the only real money in the transaction. The buyer pays more than the agreed price by check or by a payment app, apologizes for the mistake, and asks you to refund the difference. The original payment later fails; your refund does not.

The reason it works is a genuine quirk of banking rather than anything to do with cards. As the FTC puts it: “By law, banks have to make deposited funds available quickly. Even if you see the funds in your account, that doesn’t mean it’s a good check.” The same page notes that “fake checks can take weeks to be discovered and untangled” — long after you have posted the cards and wired the difference.

The FTC’s line on this in a 2022 alert for online sellers is simply: “Never deposit a check for more than the selling price.”

What to do: refuse the overpayment rather than refunding it. Ask for the correct amount to be sent and the incorrect payment to be reversed by the sender. Never be the one who moves money outward.

“Can you do friends and family? It saves us both the fees”

It saves the buyer the fees. What it costs you is every protection you had.

PayPal’s Seller Protection policy excludes “personal payments including a payment sent using PayPal’s friends and family functionality”. There is no partial cover and no appeal. If that payment is reversed you are an unsecured creditor of a stranger.

Worth knowing even for ordinary goods-and-services payments: the same policy states that Seller Protection does not apply when “the buyer claims (either with us or their card issuer) that the item you sent isn’t what was ordered”. Seller Protection is built around items that never arrived, not items a buyer says were wrong.

What to do: keep the sale on the platform, take the fee, and treat a request to avoid fees as the tell it is. A buyer who wants to strip out the dispute process usually intends to use it.

“Payment sent — check your email”

The message arrives, the email arrives, the branding is right, and the seller ships. The money never existed. Fake payment notifications are cheap to produce and are aimed squarely at the gap between a buyer saying they have paid and you confirming it.

The FTC’s advice for sellers is blunt about the underlying move: “Don’t accept a mobile payment from someone you don’t know.” At minimum, treat every notification as a claim rather than a fact.

What to do: never verify a payment from inside the message announcing it. Close the email. Open your banking or payment app from your own device, and look at the balance. If the money is not there, nothing has happened.

“This isn’t the card I bought”

The return swap is the scam that is specific to this hobby. A buyer receives a card, opens a not-as-described case, and returns a different card — a played copy, a counterfeit, or a wholly different print. Cards are small, similar, and hard to tell apart in a photograph, which is exactly the property that makes them attractive to steal this way.

The timings are not folklore, they are policy. Under the eBay Money Back Guarantee, a buyer has “30 calendar days after the estimated or actual delivery date” — or the seller’s own returns window if that is longer — to open a request. On a not-as-described claim, the seller pays return shipping.

You cannot argue your way out of this after the fact. You can only have taken the photographs beforehand.

What to do: before anything is packed, photograph the card front and back with the centring and edges visible, photograph any distinguishing flaw close up, then photograph it inside the sleeve and top loader, and finally the sealed package with the shipping label attached. Our guide to photographing cards for an offer covers the lighting; the same shots serve as evidence. If the returned card is not yours, the difference should be visible between two photographs rather than argued in prose. It also helps to know the tells of a counterfeit and of a tampered slab before one comes back to you.

“Ship it to my forwarder instead — it’s a different address”

A request to send goods anywhere other than the address on the order should end the conversation. This one is not a matter of caution but of documentation: PayPal’s Seller Protection requires proof of delivery showing “an address for the recipient that matches the shipping address on the Transaction Details page”.

Ship elsewhere and you have voluntarily destroyed the evidence you would need. The buyer can then report the item as never delivered, and the record agrees with them.

What to do: ship to the address on the order or cancel the sale. If the buyer needs a different address, they can cancel and reorder with the correct one.

“Here’s the tracking number — it says delivered”

Two different things wear this costume. The first is a buyer producing tracking that does not correspond to your parcel, in an attempt to build a story. The second, and more damaging, is a link: a message that appears to come from a carrier, asking you to sign in or pay a small redelivery fee. The page is a copy, and what it collects is your password.

What to do: never open tracking through a link someone sent you. Copy the tracking number and paste it into the carrier’s own site. If a message asks you to log in to see delivery information, it is phishing, whatever the logo says.

“My son bought this without asking me”

This one usually arrives after delivery, sometimes weeks later, and it is the setup for a chargeback rather than a platform case. The buyer goes to their card issuer instead of the marketplace, which puts the dispute on the issuer’s timeline rather than eBay’s 30-day window.

The defense is the same evidence pack as the return swap, plus tracking that shows delivery to the order address. Keep it for at least six months; a card issuer dispute can arrive long after you have forgotten the sale.

The messages at a glance

What actually protects you

Three things, in order of how much they matter.

Where the money is. On-platform payments carry a dispute process. Friends and family payments, checks, wires and gift cards do not. Almost every message above exists to move you from the first category to the second.

What you photographed before posting. Evidence gathered after a dispute opens is worth very little. Evidence gathered before the parcel was sealed decides cases.

Whether you rushed. Every scam here uses urgency: a buyer traveling tomorrow, a payment that needs confirming now, a code that expires in minutes. Slowness costs you almost nothing on a real sale and defeats most of these outright.

None of this is a reason to avoid selling to strangers. It is a reason to keep the transaction boring — priced from real sold comps, packed properly, paid for in the ordinary way, and documented before it leaves your hands.

If you would rather skip the marketplace entirely, you can send us photos of the collection and get a written offer without ever having to work out whether a stranger is real.