Somebody posted on r/ValorantTradingPost earlier this week that they sold a Radiant-tier account they'd been building for two years, handed over the credentials, and didn't realize anything was wrong until they opened Venmo an hour later. The payment wasn't reversed. It was never sent. The buyer had shown them a screenshot of a Venmo "payment sent" screen, edited to show the right amount and the seller's name. That was the whole scam.
It's sometimes called the fake payment proof scam, and it's been spreading through Valorant trading communities on Discord and Reddit throughout 2026. It's not complicated technically. It doesn't need to be.
How does the fake payment screenshot scam work?
A buyer reaches out with a normal-looking profile — sometimes a real one with subreddit history, sometimes a new account with a few generic comments elsewhere to look less suspicious. They ask specific questions about the account: rank, skins owned, original email access, region. They agree quickly on price. Then they tell you they've sent payment and share a screenshot to prove it.
Venmo's "payment sent" screen is one of the most commonly forged because it requires almost no skill to fake. Two text fields edited on any phone give you a convincing confirmation. Zelle confirmations work the same way. Crypto is a different version of the same trick: the buyer sends a real blockchain explorer link showing a transaction as "unconfirmed" and tells you it'll settle in a few minutes. Sometimes the transaction is for $0.02 of an agreed $60 — easy to miss in a small screenshot on your phone. Sometimes the transaction never confirms and eventually drops from the mempool.
The seller sees what looks like a confirmation, changes the account email and password, sends the credentials, and logs the trade as done. By the time they open their actual balance, the buyer has the account and is offline.
Why this is different from the Valorant chargeback scam
The chargeback scam (covered separately on this site) involves a buyer actually completing a PayPal Goods & Services payment, receiving the account, then filing a dispute with PayPal to reverse the charge. You get real money that later disappears.
Sellers who switched to Venmo or Zelle specifically to block that kind of reversal sometimes assume they've solved the problem. Both platforms are non-reversible by design — Zelle especially makes this clear. So a screenshot of a completed Zelle transfer should mean the money is there.
The problem is that a screenshot doesn't verify anything. Sellers who've hardened against chargebacks by switching payment methods haven't necessarily thought through the step before that: confirming the money actually exists in their own account before handing over the goods. These scammers depend entirely on that gap.
What red flags appear before you check your balance?
A few patterns appear consistently in reports from r/ValorantTradingPost and Valorant Discord trading servers this month.
The buyer proposes a "simultaneous exchange." They want you to share credentials at the exact moment they claim to send payment, so both sides are "equally at risk." In practice, this removes the 60 seconds you'd need to verify your own balance before handing over anything.
The screenshot shows up before you've confirmed payment details. A doctored image can be made in advance. Real payment notifications take a few seconds to process and arrive on your device. Getting a confirmation screenshot instantly isn't proof of speed — it often means the image was ready before the conversation started.
They avoid payment methods that send email receipts to you. Venmo sends both parties a confirmation email when money moves. If a buyer wants to pay via Venmo but wants you to confirm from their screenshot rather than waiting for your own notification email, that's worth asking about.
For crypto, "pending" and "unconfirmed" are not the same as received. A low-priority transaction can sit unconfirmed for hours, then be dropped without ever clearing. Sharing a mempool link isn't proof of payment — it's proof that a transaction was broadcast, which is a very different thing.
How to protect yourself as a Valorant account seller
The scam only works if you treat the buyer's screenshot as confirmation. Your own balance is the only thing that actually confirms payment.
Before sending any account credentials:
Open your own app — Venmo, Zelle, your crypto wallet — and find the transaction in your own history. Not a notification or a screenshot they sent: your actual balance and transaction list.
For crypto, wait for at least one network confirmation visible in the receiving wallet. For accounts worth more than $50, two confirmations is safer.
Tell buyers before negotiating that you need 60–90 seconds to verify receipt on your end before sharing anything. Any legitimate buyer accepts this without pushback.
Never split credential delivery by giving the email first and the password later. The original email is the key to account recovery requests — handing it over without confirmed payment gives a scammer everything they need to lock you out and keep the account.
Accounts with no Reddit history or very recent creation dates are behind a disproportionate share of these scams on r/ValorantTradingPost right now. One thread from earlier this month documented the same stolen account resold three times in two days using a rotating set of brand-new accounts as the "buyer."
Selling a Valorant account violates Riot's Terms of Service, which creates ban risk for both parties regardless of whether the trade goes cleanly. This scam doesn't change that baseline — it just adds losing the account for nothing on top of it.