Almost every victim of a Wallapop scam spends the first few days writing to the seller and, once the seller stops answering, to the platform’s customer service. That is the wrong counterpart, for a simple legal reason. Wallapop is an intermediary service provider within the meaning of Spain’s Law 34/2002 on information society services, and it is not a party to the sale, which is a contract between two private individuals under article 1445 of the Spanish Civil Code. The platform only has something to return to you if the money went through its Shipping system, and under no circumstances can it hand you the seller’s identity, address or bank account, because data protection law forbids it from doing so for a private individual. A court or the police can demand that information. The counterpart who actually solves the problem is the investigating court, through a criminal complaint, and your bank when the payment was made by card. Writing to Wallapop helps to document the case and ensures the platform preserves the seller’s data, which has its value, but it does not get your money back.
How you paid decides what you can recover
The first thing we ask anyone who comes to the firm with this problem is how the money left, because each route has a different party responsible and a different chance of recovery. The scammer knows this better than anyone, which is why the first move is always to take the payment outside the app, on the excuse of saving the fee, of the Shipping system giving trouble, or of the item being reserved for another buyer who will lose out unless you send a deposit by Bizum.
| How you paid | Who holds the money | What you can recover and through which route |
|---|---|---|
| Wallapop Shipping | The platform holds it until you confirm receipt | Refund through the in-app dispute, within 48 hours of delivery under its current terms |
| Card on an external link | The scammer’s account, already credited | Chargeback through your bank under payment services regulations |
| Bizum or bank transfer | The recipient’s account, credited immediately and irrevocably | Neither the platform nor your bank returns it on its own; what remains is the criminal complaint and the civil liability arising from the offence |
| PayPal outside the app | PayPal, under its own policy | Buyer protection only if you paid for goods and services, never if you paid a friend |
| Cash in hand | The seller | Only the criminal complaint, if you manage to identify them |
With Shipping the platform acts as an escrow holder and the money does not reach the seller until you accept the item. If what arrives is not what was advertised, or nothing arrives, the dispute is opened inside the app and the refund comes out of money that never stopped being held. That is why scammers do not sell through Shipping.
With Bizum and bank transfers the credit to the destination account is immediate and you gave the order voluntarily, so the bank does not cancel it at the payer’s request. If the scammer also used the reversed Bizum trick, sending you a payment request disguised as a payment which you accept believing you are receiving money, the result is the same.
With a card the position improves, because chargebacks exist and the bank has specific obligations regarding transactions the cardholder did not authorise. How that claim is framed and with which arguments is the lawyer’s job, and I explain it in more detail in the article on getting a bank refund after phishing.
What to do today so you lose neither the evidence nor more money
The Wallapop chat is the central piece of evidence, because the deception is in it. Save screenshots of the whole thread, including timestamps and the username, and do not delete the conversation even if the seller deactivates their account, because the platform keeps the associated data and the court will be able to request it. Also keep the listing’s address, the seller’s profile with its ratings, the payment receipt showing the IBAN or the phone number you sent the Bizum to, any tracking number you were given and any emails or messages from a supposed courier, without forwarding them, because the technical data of the original message is what allows the source to be traced. I wrote about why this matters in electronic evidence decides cases.
Report the listing and the user inside the app, not because it will refund anything, but so there is an internal record and the platform blocks the seller and preserves the information.
Do not make any further payment. The second phase of many of these scams consists of asking for a supplement for customs, for shipping insurance or for a return fee. And be wary of anyone who calls or writes afterwards offering to recover your money in exchange for an advance, because that call comes from the same organisation using the data it already holds.
Fraud under the Criminal Code and its penalties
What happened to you falls under article 248 of the Spanish Criminal Code, which punishes anyone who, for gain, uses a sufficient deception to cause error in another person and induces them to make a disposition of assets to their own detriment. A listing for an item that does not exist, a seller who takes the money and vanishes, or a payment link imitating Wallapop is that deception.
The penalty is set by article 249, and the amount makes the difference. If the sum defrauded exceeds 400 euros, the penalty is imprisonment of six months to three years. If it does not exceed that figure, the fraud is a minor offence punished with a fine of one to three months. Article 250 raises the penalty to imprisonment of one to six years plus a fine when an aggravating circumstance applies, such as the amount exceeding 50,000 euros or the fraud affecting a large number of people, and the latter is the usual situation when a single listing has taken money from dozens of buyers. Article 74 also allows the conduct of someone who deceives successive victims with the same method to be treated as a continuing offence, so the amounts are added together and your 80 euro case stops being a minor matter as soon as the other victims appear.
What matters to you is that a conviction carries the civil liability of articles 109 and following of the Criminal Code, which obliges the offender to return what was taken and compensate the loss, and that sum is claimed within the criminal proceedings themselves without opening a separate lawsuit.
How a seller is identified from a username or an IBAN
This is the real size of the problem. You have a username, a phone number you sent a Bizum to, or an IBAN. None of those on its own leads to a person with a name and an address, and without that person there is nobody to convict and nobody to claim against.
Wallapop stores, linked to each account, the email address, the phone number, the connection IP addresses and, if the user has ever been paid through Shipping, the linked bank account. The bank knows the holder of any IBAN and of the phone number linked to a Bizum. None of that is given to you, but it is given to an investigating court or to the police unit handling the case, upon a formal request. The usual route runs from the username to the phone, from the phone to the account and from the account to its holder.
That holder is not always the scammer. Frequently it is a money mule, someone who has lent their account for a commission or was tricked into opening it, who answers for their own conduct, including possible money laundering under article 301 of the Criminal Code, while the investigation tries to work back to whoever runs the fraud. When the destination account was opened with stolen documents, the trail runs out and the case ends up shelved. The quality of the initial complaint weighs heavily on whether the court asks for what it needs from the outset and on whether months are lost. At the firm, when a client arrives with a username and an IBAN, we prepare the complaint so the court has from day one what it needs to make its requests to the platform and the bank, and it is the kind of matter we handle through our cybercrime practice.
Where to report it and how long you have
The complaint is filed at any National Police station or Civil Guard post, in certain cases online, or directly at the duty court. Bring the screenshots and receipts printed or on a device from which they can be handed over, because a complaint without the chat and the proof of payment forces a second appointment to complete it.
The seller being in another province, or you not knowing where they are, does not force you to file away from home. The Spanish Supreme Court resolves these jurisdiction questions in remote frauds by applying the ubiquity criterion, and holds that the competent court is the one for the place where the victim was deceived and made the payment, which is normally where the victim lives. Report it in A Coruña if you live in A Coruña.
As for time limits, the criminal action is time-barred after one year for the minor offence, which means frauds of up to 400 euros, after five years for fraud under article 249 and after ten for the aggravated version under article 250, in accordance with article 131 of the Criminal Code. Those limits are long, but the evidence does not wait that long. Platforms and operators keep connection data for a limited period, and a complaint filed six months later often arrives when there is nothing left to request.
What happens after you file the complaint
The complaint reaches an investigating court, which opens preliminary proceedings or, if the amount does not exceed 400 euros and the offender is identified, a minor offence trial. During the investigation the court sends its requests to Wallapop and the banks, receives the replies and, if an account holder appears, summons them to give a statement as a suspect. You will be summoned to confirm your complaint and, if there is a trial, as a witness. There is no obligation to attend with a lawyer for that, although only by joining the proceedings as a private prosecutor can you propose investigative steps and influence what the court requests. I describe the minor offence route in claiming in a minor offence trial.
If the investigation identifies nobody, the court orders a provisional dismissal, which in practice means the case is shelved. It does not close the matter for good, because it can be reopened if new information appears, and it is in fact common for another complaint about the same listing in a different court to end up with the cases being joined against the same offender. Receiving the dismissal notice without anyone explaining this is the most frequent complaint from people who report on their own.
If there is a trial and a conviction, the judgment fixes the sum the offender must return to you, and the court collects it during enforcement. A judgment saying you are owed 300 euros and those 300 euros arriving in your account are two different things, and depend on what the convicted person owns. Timings vary enormously by court and workload, and anyone who promises you a date is guessing.
If the case is shelved, the civil route remains
A sale between two private individuals is governed by the Civil Code, and someone who takes payment and does not deliver is in breach of contract even if the criminal court could not prove the deception. That breach is claimed through the civil courts, before the court of first instance, with an action that is time-barred after five years under article 1964 of the Civil Code. Given the amounts involved, these claims are handled as small claims proceedings, which since Royal Decree-Law 6/2023 cover sums up to 15,000 euros. The advantage over the criminal route is that there is no need to prove intent to deceive, only that you paid and received nothing. The condition is the same as in the criminal case, you need a defendant with a name and an address, and that identity almost always comes from what the investigating court obtained before shelving the case.
Two things the general guides leave out are worth knowing. The first is that the consumer protection rules of Royal Legislative Decree 1/2007 do not automatically apply to a sale between private individuals, because the seller is not a trader, so do not count on the right of withdrawal or on statutory consumer guarantees, unless it turns out that the seller was in fact a professional disguised as a private individual, something sometimes revealed by the volume of listings. The second is that claiming against Wallapop as a platform does not succeed in normal circumstances, because Law 34/2002 exempts the intermediary from liability for what its users publish as long as it has no actual knowledge of the illegality, and the platform only answers for what it undertook to do itself, which means the money it was holding in Shipping.
Winning the civil judgment and collecting on it are also two different things, and with a scammer who has a record the second problem is usually the bigger one. I wrote about that in collecting from a debtor who says they have nothing.
What is at stake if you do it on your own
The concrete risk in these matters is twofold. A complaint filed late or without the technical data the court needs to make its requests to the platform and the bank ends in a dismissal for unknown offender, and from that point there is nobody to claim against, in the criminal courts or the civil ones. And a card payment claimed poorly from the bank, or out of time, loses a refund that was within reach.
At the firm we act for victims of frauds committed through marketplace platforms, prepare the complaint with the electronic evidence properly ordered, join the proceedings as private prosecutor so the court requests what is needed and claim civil liability within the case, and we pursue the chargeback with the bank when the payment was made by card. You can call +34 677 841 007 or write through the contact page, and we will tell you in the first conversation whether your case has a realistic path.
When you call, have to hand the chat screenshots, the link to or screenshot of the listing, the seller’s username, the payment receipt showing the destination account or phone number, the exact date of the payment and, if you have already reported it, the police report or case number. With that the matter can be assessed in a single call.
Frequently asked questions
Will Wallapop refund me if I paid by Bizum or bank transfer outside the app?
No. Wallapop only refunds money it has held in its Shipping system, because in that case it acts as an escrow holder until the buyer confirms receipt. If the payment went out by Bizum, bank transfer or any external route, the platform never had that money and is not liable for the sale, which is a contract between two private individuals. What it does do is keep the seller’s data and hand it over to the court or the police when formally requested, and for that you need to file a complaint.
Can the bank cancel a Bizum or a transfer I have already sent?
In normal circumstances no, because you gave the order voluntarily and the credit to the destination account is immediate. The bank can attempt an informal recall by asking the receiving bank to return the funds, but that depends on the holder consenting or on the money still being in the account, and in a scam it has been withdrawn within minutes. The position is different if the payment was made by card or if a transaction was carried out from your account without your involvement, because then payment services regulations come into play and the bank has refund obligations. Framing that claim to the bank with the right arguments is the lawyer’s job.
What happens after I file the complaint and will I have to go to trial?
The complaint reaches an investigating court, which requests the seller’s data from Wallapop and the banks. If it identifies someone, it summons them as a suspect and you will be summoned to confirm your complaint and, if there is a trial, as a witness, for which you do not need a lawyer. If it identifies nobody, it orders a provisional dismissal, which is a shelving that can be reopened if new information appears. When there is a conviction, the judgment fixes the sum the offender must return to you without you having to open a separate lawsuit. The total time depends on the court and on how quickly the platform and the bank reply.
Is it worth reporting it and hiring a lawyer over 50 or 100 euros?
Reporting it is always worthwhile, however small the amount, because it costs nothing, it gets the platform to block the seller, and your complaint is added to those of other victims of the same listing, which turns a minor offence into a continuing fraud carrying a prison sentence. Hiring a lawyer over 50 or 100 euros does not pay off financially if the payment was by Bizum or bank transfer and no other victims are known, because the cost exceeds what you can recover. It does pay off when the amount is significant, when you paid by card and there is a bank refund to claim, when an identified account holder has emerged, or when there are several victims and it makes sense to join the proceedings so the case is not shelved.