How do I stay safe meeting a stranger from an online marketplace?

The library’s answer has a mechanism in it, not just a location. Suggest a safe spot, then watch what the suggestion does to the other person.

The location is the test. The location is the test says the standard advice, meet somewhere public, is fine and incomplete. Suggest a designated safe-exchange spot, and treat the other person’s reaction to that suggestion as the real answer about the deal. Many police departments across the US and Canada keep a marked, camera-covered parking space or an open lobby for online-sale meetups; officers will not referee your phone sale, but the value is deterrence, a place crime declines to attend. If no station is near, anywhere with staff, steady foot traffic, good light and cameras does the same job, a busy fast-food place, a library, a staffed petrol station, in daylight, with a friend along if you can manage it. The page keeps one honest note its sources insisted on: a police forecourt is not a comfort to everyone, and if your history or your community’s makes standing outside a station feel less safe, the busy-bright-staffed rules do the same job. Then the larger half: an honest buyer or seller shrugs and agrees to the safe spot, because it costs them nothing. The person with other plans suddenly has a problem, the meetup that has to move somewhere quieter, the actually can you just come to my place, the ghost who reappears needing to meet right now, tonight. People who trade a lot treat any of those as the end of the conversation, not a negotiation. The same filter runs on money: agree the payment method with the place, and treat a late switch, a cheque instead of cash, an app you have never used, an overpayment needing a refund, exactly like a late change of venue. Never hand out your home address as a first resort, sell in daylight, deposit cash the same hour, and keep the rule that outranks the location: a deal you can walk away from is the only kind worth walking into.

Let the unknown number ring out. The scouting happens before the meeting, and Let the unknown number ring out is about the unknown calls that pile up once your number is somewhere public. Seven separate conversations there say an answered call marks the line as live and brings more; if you do answer, say put me on your do-not-call list and let them finish, and never say wrong number, which three corrections say does the same thing while feeling clever. That page’s safety line: any caller who already has your details and is asking you to confirm them is a scam until proven otherwise, so hang up and ring the organisation back on the number printed on its own paperwork. Never give a caller card or bank details to make them stop.

If the stranger is you, returning something. Call the card before you post the wallet is for the wallet on the passenger seat that is not yours. The tip you may have heard, drop it in a mailbox, is carried by seventeen conversations there and is true in the way a favour is true: the US postal service has said a wallet in a collection box is not mail, and it may arrive with postage owed. Call first, the number on the back of a card, or walk into a branch of the owner’s bank, which six conversations did and had the owner contacted at once. Its safety line: a bag or package that looks abandoned and wrong is not a wallet; do not touch it, and call the police.

Who this is not for. The location page’s own rule covers the deal that has already gone wrong: if the other party will not agree to a safe place or a payment method, that is the answer, and there is no version of the meetup to salvage. And the unknown-number page says plainly that if the caller is chasing a debt you actually owe, it is the wrong page; deal with the debt, or get free debt advice, rather than playing the games that page refuses.