Received a message from a member that does not exist

[SuperArtByMegan]

Hello, everyone.

I'm a new seller here and could really use some help right now.

I got an email notifying me that I received a message from another Etsy member. Just as I went into my account to check the message, it was not there. I checked every folder and still no message. I looked up this person just out of curiosity and saw that they are not currently selling on Etsy and that they don't exist anymore. This person has made 100+ orders with a four-star average rating so I'm guessing they are legit. It's so weird that I received a message from someone with good ratings/sales but has an inactive store and does not exist. Do you think this might have been a scam?

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much in advance.

[TheHomespunLoft]

@SuperArtByMegan 

Likely Etsy removed the message as SPAM before you were able to respond to it. Scammers tend to go after new sellers. 

Yes- it was likely a scammer.

[SuperArtByMegan]

@TheHomespunLoft Hello. Thank you so much for your reply. I was very well thinking it was a spam or scam message. It was weird that the message was gone roughly a couple minutes after I got the email.

[TheHomespunLoft]

@SuperArtByMegan 

sometimes Etsy moves really fast.. I think lots of us have seen that type of thing. I know I did this summer.

[BootifulLabels]

The history of the user could be genuine, but the seller might no longer be active. The account may well have been hacked and the message sent as part of a scam.  Etsy may have flagged it as suspicious, removed the message and closed the account before you noticed the message.

[SuperArtByMegan]

@BootifulLabels Hello. Thank you for your response. This is starting to make more sense now. I did contact Etsy support before making this topic just to see if they could help and they confirmed that it was a scam message. It's crazy how scammers can come up with these kinds of scams.

[CanningCrafts]

The account may have been compromised or closed by Etsy. If you're curious, technically you can still see the message content in the Etsy email notification you get, it's just hidden by Etsy. In your email app, you can find in the settings where you can "View Source", then scroll down through the html... you will see the original message sent by the Etsy user in the html code. Sometimes when this has happened to other sellers, the message may seem pretty basic or innocent, just asking a question. But sometimes that's how scam messages start out.