bravocharlie

Dave Jones risks his identity to educate all of us on the anatomy of an eBay scam.  Actually he was never in any serious danger as he recognized the signs all along.  But an interesting story nonetheless about how a scammer can take you to a place where they end up sending you a manual invoice (not connected to the auction itself) so that eBay buyer protection will no longer apply to you.

So by now it’s clear how this scam works:

• They set up new ebay and payapal accounts
• A really good scammer would hack an existing ebay account, or increase the feedback by buying a ton of 99 cent items from other fake accounts of theirs etc, but this one was content with zero feedback.
• List something exotic but one that would have high demand, and do a really good job with the listing making out they are the owner who needs to sell it because it’s not needed any more.
• Deliberately set up the PayPal account in foreign currency so the (almost certainly US or other major country like Australia) buyers PayPal checkout will fail.
• Make it out they have no idea what’s wrong and that they are sending an invoice manually, and try to convince you that ebay ok’d this.
• Sucker pays the money and they vanish with it. Maybe they might complete the scam by sending you an empty box with tracking number, but they have their money, so they probably won’t bother.

Thanks Dave!

(Published from DFW, Texas)