Woman who bought $30 painting from FB marketplace finds hidden tag with real price: "I'm blown away"

Every shopper hopes to score a deal that feels almost too good to be true, but sometimes, what looks like a win at first can quickly unravel into disappointment. A singer-songwriter from Nashville, Emma Klein, recently took to TikTok to talk about a painting she bought from Facebook marketplace, which despite looking like a good buy, was not.

"I decided that I would buy a painting like this one if I came across one that was more 'artistic' than the ones I'd seen out and about shopping," Klein said.

She bought the painting, which was priced at $80, thinking it "must be really good quality." She asked the seller to bring the price down to $30 and while they were reluctant at first, she managed the deal. "I thought I had gotten a really cool piece of art for a low price," she tells Newsweek.

However, later when she went to hang up the piece, she noticed a tiny bug. While brushing it away, she saw the tag. Turns out that the piece was bought from discount store Ross Dress for Less, and cost $30. "I turned the painting over and inside of it was a tiny tag that I squinted to see, it was from Ross for $30. "What are y'all doing on Marketplace?" Klein asked in the video. "Every day I'm blown away."' 

"I had to laugh at myself and felt pretty silly at the realization that I was willing to believe a painting was more beautiful because they priced it at a higher value even though, as it turns out, it was the same quality of art I had been avoiding getting from places like Walmart and Ross all along," she told Newsweek.

Many took to the video to talk about the painting and others asked to see the painting. "Nah people think their used items are worth the same price (or more than) they bought it. People are unhinged," writes one user, while another writes, "no bc why did I go to Goodwill the other day and saw one of those plastic bowls that are 50 CENTS at Walmart priced at $6?"

The rise of platforms like Facebook marketplace and Vinted has really pushed the thrifting market in the US, which was already pretty prevalent. According to a report from Statista, the value of the worldwide secondhand apparel market is set to increase by another 100 billion dollars by 2026. With over 85% of global consumers online, eCommerce scammers have found ways to get to people's bank accounts in different ways. As per a report, big companies lose close to $48 billion to fraud each year, and consumers too lose out on a lot of money, especially during the latter half of the year.

"The rise is not surprising. Just as the ‘Cyber five’ early shopping holiday period is a peak time for consumers, it is also an active time period for digital shopping scams, with significantly higher digital fraud attempts during this time period than during the rest of the year," said Cecilia Seiden speaking of the escalation in these frauds, especially during the holidays.