Coles worker suffers shattered foot after Facebook sale goes wrong
Rebekah Streader only realised after the incident that the man had used a fake social media account to contact her.
A Coles worker will be unable to work for months after her foot was run over by the very car she was trying to sell on Facebook Marketplace for extra cash.
Grandmother Rebekah Streader made the difficult decision to sell her Holden ClubSport in a bid to keep a roof over her family's head and listed it on the social media platform where a man, who reportedly introduced himself as Caleb, quickly expressed interest. The pair arranged a time for him to inspect the vehicle at her home in Melbourne, but the potential sale quickly turned sour.
After he asked for a test drive and Streader handed over the keys, he allegedly managed to lock the doors of the car before she could get inside. Desperate, she pleaded for him to stop.
"I was banging on the window asking him to stop because this car is something I bought years ago and I thought, 'I don't want to lose it. I can't afford to lose it'," she told 9News. The man ran over her foot, in full view of her 15-year-old son, as he drove off in her car.
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Grandmother faced two surgeries after foot ran over
Streader has since undergone two surgeries this week and she will be unable to walk for months while her foot heals from the incident.
She turned to the Facebook messages she exchanged with the man in the hope she could identify him and only then realised he had been using a fake account, making it difficult to track him down. She reportedly describes him as 170 centimetres tall with a medium build and a goatee.
Since the incident Streader is urging Facebook to increase security, claiming "it's too easy for people to be scammed and ripped off". "Facebook needs a big change now," she said.
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