I tried to sell a Thinkpad on eBay last night. This morning, I wake up, and someone has chosen the “Buy It Now” option, and sent me the following email:
Real credible, right?
So, I spend an hour on “Live Chat” with eBay trying to get my fees refunded and this guy’s purchase cancelled (I don’t want him to leave negative feedback, though I doubt he’d dare). I list the item again, and this time mention that I will not ship internationally. Within a few minutes of the listing, I get another email, from a different jackass.
I have not sold something on eBay for a while - I had no idea how bad this had gotten. What a joke. I hope for eBay’s sake that they’re doing something about it, because I really don’t need to put up with this shit. Hopefully another dipshit won’t choose Buy It Now and force me to do all this crap over again.
I had one of these crooks snipe my auction last weekend. Once they realized I wasn’t gonna give them my PayPal account number or send them anything, they pulled their account from eBay (which they had registered that morning) and vanished. Fortunately I was able to Second Chance one of my bidders.
eBay is one of the greatest resources ever. I hope they won’t let these parasites ruin it.
Can sellers disablethe Buy It Now option? Just curious. The problems I’ve read with scammers on eBay all seem to stem from the Buy It Now thing as opposed to standard bidding.
What was the feedback score from those users? I typically restrict the feedback score on my auctions to prevent people who have just signed up from buying expensive stuff and scamming me.
Sellers don’t have to use the Buy-It-Now option at all, if they don’t want too.
I’ve been getting a lot of phoney second-chance offers lately. For example, I bid $200 on something, it goes to $400 with five or so bidders higher than me, and I get a second-chance offer – sometimes even before the auction has closed. The offers don’t come through eBay, and they clearly are not from the real seller, but presumably they hope that if you respond, they can tell you how to send them money.
Match.com used to be plagued with Russian bride spam. After a year-long infestation of “I am Svetlana and I admire you structure” email messages pissed off their membership and threatened their reputation, Match hit upon a brilliant solution - block Russia and Eastern Europe. Most of the spam went away immediately (snaps fingers).
Why doesn’t eBay just block access from Nigeria and satellite ISPs that serve Nigerian cybercafes?
In my case the scammer’s feedback was zero (you can’t restrict zero feedback, only negative). My auction was not BIN; the prick just sniped in the last minutes of the auction.
Yeah, in the future, I think I will avoid it. But I know that I personally like buying things using Buy It Now, rather than waiting a week to confirm that I won the auction, only to have it sniped out from under me in the last minute.
Well, who knows exactly what the scam was going to be. I imagine they would have sent a fake “Paypal payment - click here to claim” link, or something like that, trying to get me to enter my account information.
typically, they send you what appears to be valid funds. You send them the item, by the time you find out the money is fake, you are out the item. Also, they tend to send you a higher dollar amount than the item costs and ask you to keep a portion and send the difference, in that scam you are out your cash AND your item.
BTW, they are now using TDD systems to do the scam. The company my mom works for got a TDD request a few weeks ago that was a scam. The scummy thing is, the operators can’t tell you that they are scamming you. Even if they know.
In the “Nigerian scam”, the buyer tells the seller that he will overpay for the item, usually with some concocted excuse. He asks that the seller refund the difference to him. The seller then discovers that the buyer’s money order was forged, after he’s already sent the money to the buyer.
This one doesn’t sound like the Nigerian scam per se, but it has all the hallmarks - they usually have poor grammar and punctuation, are short on details about the item itself, and contain extraneous information (what does his brother’s birthday have to do with anything?) Might be a different scam, or he might be waiting to introduce the overpayment angle after he gets a bite from the seller.
You can block international bidders from bidding on your auctions. Also make sure you block bidders with negative feedback.
I seem to recall there being an option like “restrict sales to buyers with n+ feedback score”. I usually restrict my sales to buyers with 10+ feedback, and have never gotten scammed.
You can’t block questions from buyers outside of your shipping area, but you can prevent them from placing bids or using the BIN. There is an option in your preferences where you can:
Not accept bids from users with less than 0 feedback
Not accept bids from users with more than x bid retractions in the last month (can’t remember what the exact figure is)
Not accept bids from users located in places you do not ship to
The last point is the most important as it will prevent people outside of your shipping radius from placing bids or killing your BINs.
Yes, this is a good option. If you go under my eBay -> My Account -> Preferences and click on “Buyer Requirements” you can choose to block buyers with a feedback score of X or less, you can block buyers who are registered in a country you don’t ship to (also very helpful), and buyers with any unpaid item strikes against them. Setting these preferences will at least help protect you from scammers a little.