ebay Laptop Scammers Part II
- August 13th, 2006
- Posted in Digital Life
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(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!
Very good reading. Peace until next time.
WaltDe
Yup. I had to list a DVD player 3 times before it was finally bought by a non-scammer. And I had to block one bid on my third attempt (you can block buyers). The bid that I blocked looked like a scam and upon further investigation I found that it most certainly was (their max bid was $444 for a player that sells for $120). Now I’m debating whether or not to list a laptop on eBay. The eBay security leaves something to be desired.
Not sure if you’ll get this, but I’m in this exact situation right now and was looking for some advice as to how I should report the person who won? I think the second chance person is legit, as we have emailed back and forth on questions about the laptop, so I feel like it’s legit. Anyhow, this sucks, and I totally feel your pain right now.
Hey Jake. My advice is to require a phone number and call to speak with them personally. I found this to weed out most scammers. Also, if you have any direct emails from the bidder, check their email headers and do a geographical lookup on the originating IP address. If the bidder says they’re from Ohio, but the headers say Nigeria, then that can be an indication that they are lying to you.
My 3rd auction for this particular laptop wound up being dubious as well – not sure if the winner was a scammer but they started mentioning needing to use some alternate payment method or whatever and I just gave up on ebay at that point. I don’t know how the retail guys are even doing it these days.
I think ebay has taken steps to protect the buyer from fraud and scammers have just adapted to ripping off sellers now instead because with a stolen paypal account it’s easy for them. Laptops are as good as cash.
If I ever choose to sell on ebay again what I will do is refuse to ship to anybody that isn’t a confirmed PayPal account and even still I’ll wait about a week or so after payment is sent. Sucks for the honest buyers out there, but it is just way to easy to get scammed. eBay and PayPal aren’t doing anything to protect the sellers.
Good luck with your laptop – don’t be afraid to cancel the auction if you smell a rat! Better than loosing hundreds of dollars.
I’m going through the same thing on ebay….I’m on my 3rd. attempt. What’s a gal to do? These scammers are ruining it for everyone!!!
Hey Julie, I feel your pain. I decided that if I sell a laptop again I’m going to use craig’s list or the local want ads and require the buyer to meet me in person with cash. Probably won’t get as much money, but selling laptops on eBay is a real crap-shoot.
To add to my previous comments, I might suggest selling on ebay using their recommended escrow service. Unfortunately there are a number of scammers that use fake escrow services and as such it may scare off some buyers who are suspicous of using escrow at all. However, you could link to ebay’s page at http://pages.ebay.com/help/tp/payment-escrow.html and insist that you will only sell the item using ebay’s recommended escrow service. In the case of PayPal, they happily accept money from stolen accounts and credit cards and the seller gets shafted when the charge is reversed. This is perfect for the scammers because it takes a few days for the charges to be reversed – exactly the amount of time that most people would have shipped out the laptop. I am pretty sure by nature of an escrow service, they cannot take the money back.