Safety on Gunfinder

With our marketplace feature, we want to offer hunters and sport shooters a new way to buy and sell firearms among themselves.

However, due to user negligence, fraud cases cannot be completely ruled out.

Every seller on our marketplace must verify their identity before they can list items for sale. You can read more about our identity verification here.
Despite all precautions, however, no platform can guarantee 100% security. That's why it's important to protect yourself and follow the safety tips below:

Always use the Gunfinder chat for your communication. This way, we can view your exchange if needed and be there to help you. Photos shared via our chat are automatically watermarked to prevent misuse.

Make sure that in addition to an ID card, you also receive a selfie of the seller holding their ID. This confirms that the person presenting the ID is also its legitimate owner. If you need to share documents outside of the Gunfinder chat, always add a watermark to prevent misuse.
Once you have the seller's ID and WBK, contact the seller's responsible Waffenbehörde and verify the details there again! This will reliably protect you from fraud attempts involving forged documents.

Conduct video calls in which the seller presents the item live. The buyer should also identify themselves with their ID. This allows both parties to better verify the condition and authenticity of the item as well as the identity of the other person, and provides an additional layer of security.

Only use payment methods that offer buyer protection! This protects you from potential fraud and ensures that you can get your money back if something goes wrong.

By following these tips, you can actively contribute to your own safety on the Gunfinder marketplace and ensure that your transactions are as secure as possible.

• Poor, incorrect, or suspiciously simple language

• An email address that does not end with @gunfinder.de

• The email does not address you by your username.

• The email is sent to one of your email addresses that you never used to register with Gunfinder.

Phishing is an attempt by a third party to obtain a user's data through fake emails or websites.

The third party poses as a trustworthy person or imitates the identity of another person/company — in this case pretending to be a Gunfinder admin.

Their main targets are usernames, email addresses, passwords, and payment details.

Please let us know if you received a suspicious email!

You can reach us at: [email protected]

Fake accounts and fraudulent listings can often be identified quite easily.

If a seller's writing style includes poor German or poor English, it's unlikely that the seller holds a German purchase authorization — meaning the listing is probably not legitimate.

In general, we recommend finding out as much as possible about the seller. Ask for the seller's phone number and address, and verify them. For high-value items like firearms and optics, we also advise drawing up a purchase agreement and verifying the buyer's purchase authorization.

If the seller asks you to transfer money to a foreign bank account, we strongly advise against making the purchase. The first two letters of an IBAN clearly indicate where the bank is located. IBANs for German bank accounts always start with DE, and Austrian ones with AT.

We recommend agreeing with the seller on cash-on-delivery shipping — this way, the purchase price is paid to the delivery person upon receipt.

We also strongly advise our users never to transfer larger sums of money without any guarantees. Listings with suspiciously low prices should be treated with caution — while Gunfinder finds the best deals online, even we don't come across near-giveaway bargains every day!

To make Gunfinder safer, we offer sellers the option to have their identity verified. With identity verification, sellers signal to other users that they are not using a fake profile and help make trading among like-minded people safer and fairer.

Listings from users who have verified their identity also receive more attention from buyers and are clicked on more often. Confirming their identity therefore also helps sellers market their products more effectively.

We recommend that all buyers and sellers communicate exclusively via the messaging feature and not via email, and to never share sensitive data over email.

Communicating via email or WhatsApp significantly reduces your security!

When verifying purchase eligibility, users on other platforms often send photos or scans of their WBK or Jagdschein — when images are sent through our messaging system, they are automatically watermarked. This prevents the recipient from using the images to impersonate someone else.

ID scan with watermark. The document cannot be misused by fraudsters:

Anyone who wants to be on the safe side should check with the authority that issued the purchase permit to confirm whether the holder is authorized to make a purchase. However, the holder of the purchase permit being checked must consent to this verification. We recommend always getting in touch with the issuing authority.