An eagle-eyed consumer took to the Lowyat.net message board forum to voice concerns of marketplace websites like Lazada and Mudah being inundated with too-good-to-be-true pricing on Macbooks.
In their original post, forum user Whycare detailed that there seemed to be an incredibly large number of retailers offering bargain-basement prices on Apple gadgets, often half the going market rate.
Lazada has recently allowed individuals to act as merchants on the e-commerce site. Previously, any retailer wanting to sell their goods on Lazada needed to have an SSM registration number in order to act as sellers on the platform.
Many of the questionable retailers will then contact the interested consumer and ask them to use personal banking to pay into their accounts directly, as opposed to the payment platform on Lazada, which offers buyer protection.
For their part, the company has started taking down suspicious pages after consumers alerted them; however, they have also declined to comment on the matter further until “internal investigations” are complete.
Whycare engaged with one of the dubious sellers, and below is a record of their communications. They added that the banking receipt was not genuine, but rather they wanted to know how far the retailer would go. Here is the conversation they had via WhatsApp:
There you have it: if it’s too good to be true – it probably is. Even when legit sales do happen, they’re still too good to be true, and will shut down due to popularity.
