(If you haven’t read my previous post about my saga with trying to sell a laptop on ebay, you can find it below this post.)

I just received a message from ebay that the 2nd highest bidder for this auction was a hijacked account. I won’t post them here since the account has been returned to the righful owner, who was also a victim in this story. So, basically, the winning bidder was a scammer from Israel and the 2nd place bidder was a hijacked account operated by a scammer out of Russia.  (This is my 2nd time listing this laptop, btw, my original auction was won by a scammer from Nigeria.) Really encouraging!

I was able to get my listing fee refunded again, which is about the only good thing. The process seems to be to go to the “dispute center” link and click that the item wasn’t paid. You can then select either “the account is no longer registered” or “i never received payment.” The weird thing is that when you select the no-longer-registered option, the next page still says that you are about to send a payment reminder. Kinda weird. However, after you click that button, it automatically gives you back full credit. It just kinda sucks that you have to wait several days before you can even do this. Basically, as soon as your auction is over, if the winner is a fraud, the best you can hope for is that they don’t pay you.

I currently have my laptop listed for a 3rd time on ebay and I’m not terribly optimistic about it selling at this point. Maybe it’s just that laptops are too easy a target for scammers these days? I don’t think I will get as much if I list it on craigslist since the target audience is smaller, but at least I can meet the buyer in person and require them to pay cash.

Hopefully there will only be one more post to make regarding this subject, and that will be that I have sold the laptop to an honest buyer!

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Well, I have just had some first-hand experience with what seems to be the latest ebay scam. That is, when you try to sell a laptop, scammers bid on it and use stolen PayPal accounts to pay for it. After a few weeks PayPal takes the money back and your laptop is gone!

I had read about a similar scam that just happened to another guy as I was listing my Sony Vaio laptop for sale. So of course I’m a little cautious but I’ve had plenty of great ebay experiences, so I’m not really that worried about it.

Anyway, about 4 hours after I listed my laptop for sale someone used Buy-It-Now to purchase it. Great, I thought! But when I checked the buyers profile I see that he/she has no feedback, the account is newly created and their feedback is marked as “private” which I didn’t even know you could do. That doesn’t seem too comforting, I am thinking, but I’ll wait and see what happens. I send an ebay message to the buyer requesting that they send me their phone number. A few hours later I get a kinda odd message from they buyer. They explain to me that this is a soldier stationed in Iraq and they would like me to ship the laptop to their wife in Nigeria. Yea right! There’s no way I’m doing this, it’s obviously some kind of scam.

At this point I discovered that as a seller, you don’t really get much protection. Contractually you’re obligated to sell the laptop or risk negative feedback. But you have no course of action if you think the buyer is a phony. The only recourse you seem to have is the ability to send a payment reminder, which the last thing I want is a bogus PayPal transaction from a stolen account coming my way! I definitely do not need my PayPal account getting blocked.

Well, to keep the story moving, I submitted a fraud complaint to ebay. The buyer never contacted me again and their account was closed after about 3 days. My ebay account shows that I got a refund for my listing. Well, that wasn’t so bad. I still keep getting notices from various ebay departments so it seems like they are not really communicating internally, but at this point I’m considering myself lucky - I only wasted a couple of days.

So, putting my faith in the system, I list my Laptop again. Though no Buy-It-Now options this time! I’m not going to get hosed by the same trick.

Low and behold, a week later and the winning bidder is another new account with zero feedback. Cool! I just sent an email message. The bidder (I won’t post them just yet in case they do turn out to be legit) (**Update, this was in fact another scammer and his/her ebay account is here**) Goes by one name, but when he contacts me he wants me to ship to a different name and in a different city from where his ebay account is registered. Pretty interesting? Also, the email he sent me is through fastmail, however the originating IP address is listed in the email headers. I do a quick traceroute on it and it seems to originate in Israel. Something is not quite right here, but what can I do at this point. If he sends me a PayPal payment, they have as long as they want to take the money away from me.

Well, I’m a bit annoyed thinking I wasted another listing and another week. I contacted the next two high bidders to see if they would be interested in the “Second Chance” bid that ebay lets you do. I got a reply from the 2nd bidder and they want me to calculate the shipping to St. Petersburg Russia. What the hell is going on here! Are there any honest people left on ebay?

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