A perfect example of everything that is wrong with eBay
- Thread starter Roo
- Start date
My sympathies.sometimes people's ebay accounts get hijacked. this happened to my bf, some scammer just started selling random things on his account. thankfully ebay cleared all of that away. these sellers could just be victims of a scam as well. it seems strange that they would waste the reputation gained by all that good feedback just to get some quick profit on a scam.
Ya, i was just about to say the same thing.. it's pretty scary to think what hackers can get away with. This happened to one of my friends as a Seller. The buyers after November probably didnt bother to check her ratings since she still had over 90% positive. Yikes!
i have had the same thing happen to me on ebay. a seller had nothing but positive feedback, had paypal protection and answered all questions. i thought great the perfect person to buy something off. they had a w850i mobile phone advertised but there were 50 avalible, at the the time they were brand new out and were £30 cheaper than in the shops. so i bought on and paid instantly through paypal. i then gave him 3days to send the phone, it never come, i then by chance looked at his proile and 11 neg feedback had been left. i emailed him with no response, so i filled a cliam through paypal, beacuse others had made claims his account no longer offered the protection up to £500 ( i thought this was unfair was the listing was advertsing this and this was one o the main reasons a trusted the seller. i recieved half of what i paid for the phone!! and i blame paypal and ebay!!! the seller in all got over £50 neg feedback and was still on ebay for 3months!
ebay is a waste of space i listed and authentic chloe bag with reciept from a chloe boutique that i bought myself 3months ago and they removed it within a day!
it makes me sickebay lets people scam but when your an honest ebayer its nothing but a nightmare!
Unfortunately that's likely more to do with account hijacking than anything else and it's impossible to hold Ebay responsible for a seller who falls victim to a Phishing scam and gives away their password OR uses something trivially easy to guess/find as a password. Ebay works very well IF you're careful and know how to work it.
Here's some tricks for avoiding scams like that.
- Always look at the feedback and go view current and prior auctions. If a seller has 500 feedback from auctions selling off antique trivets and is suddenly selling off 100 Blackberry Pearls, that's an insta-red flag.
- These people will almost ALWAYS put an Email address in their auction stating a fixed price and advising you to Email them to complete the transaction.
- In some cases, a seller will 'build' an account buying and selling very cheap/junk items and or will have a 'daisy chain' of feedback among several accounts. This is easy to spot.
- Not accepting PayPal is a HUGE red flag, as are unverified PayPal accounts. If they want Western Union, RUN! Look carefully when making PayPal payments, if it says the user is unverified, DON'T PAY if you think it might be a scam without getting more verification! If in doubt, use Escrow.com. If they ask to use another escrow site and won't use Escrow.com, RUN. That's the only legit site I know of among THOUSANDS of scam sites.
- If buying from an unknown seller; you should ONLY ever make PayPal payments via a credit card. PayPal may deny you credit, but the card company won't. Dispute the charge!
I recently had two run-ins on Ebay. The first; a seller stole several of my images and ran an auction for a handbag like I was selling for my wife (she did use one picture of her own, or perhaps stole from elsewhere). I notified Ebay but got no response. On the day the auction was due to end, I got fed up. I created a 'new' Ebay ID and won the auction. When she sent an invoice, I sent one back for use of my images less the price of the handbag. Haven't heard from her since. Ebay, naturally, didn't 'cancel' the auction until FOUR DAYS after it closed. I actually think she may have been legit but I'll be damned if I'm going to let someone steal my hours of work on Ebay pictures...
Second was rather more scary. A seller listed a laptop I'd won a few days prior. Description was very similar and the pictures were identical. I contacted Ebay, no action. He had 100 or so feedback but his prior auctions were all for 99 cent items such as used phone cords etc as well as for 'backups' of his MP3 collection.
So, fake handle to the rescue. I bid on it, won it, and then told him that I'll pay but thought I'd seen the pictures elsewhere and would like him to send a picture of the laptop with his name written on a piece of paper. He sent over a picture with his Ebay username typed over the photo. Looked like he'd done it in the Paint program that comes with Windows! I was sure he'd lifted the picture off the 'net and found the exact photo in about two minutes.
My response to him was simply a link to the photo and two words; "Nice try". Amazingly, Ebay never did a thing to me, didn't suspend the 'fake' name, nothing.