Are these guys running some kind of scam?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

So, I put my anonymized resume on Craigslist. Doing this has helped me to find decent work in the past.

I received some legitimate inquiries, some of which didn’t pan out, and some of which are pending.

I received one inquiry from a gentleman who saw that I had at one time been an eBay affiliate and wanted some help with his eBay sales. He wanted me to sell his products through my eBay account, the idea being that I would then take my percentage off the top, send him the rest of the money, and he would then ship the product.

That sounded dangerous to me. If he failed to ship for whatever reason, I’d be on the hook for the full amounts, including what I had sent to him. He said that that was an objection he hadn’t foreseen but maybe we could work something out.

This was all done through email exchanges. I then researched the domain from his email address and found the name of the registrant. I asked him about that name and was told that it was his partner, who happens to live near me and that I should give him a call. I did Google the name and his supposed partner seems to have a prominent online presence as being connected with the sport for which they are selling products.

So I just talked on the phone with the partner. He does have a local area code, but that’s meaningless nowadays.

He explained to me that they had failed to pay some sort of fee to eBay (they let a date slip by) and that their account had been suspended because of it and that, try as they may, they can’t get hold of anyone at eBay who can straighten things out and get their account unsuspended in exchange for the lapsed fee. He also stated that when they try to create a new account, eBay recognizes them and refuses the registration because of the overdue fee. Because of this, they are using other people’s accounts to sell their products and giving those people a percentage.

Their excuse sounds bogus to me, but I do know how surprisingly difficult it can be to navigate the bureaucracies of some online businesses, so it’s not totally outside of the realm of possibility.

So what, if any, is the scam here? Do they plan to take the money and not ship the product, leaving me left with the shitty end of a stick? Is this some sort of money laundering thing? Are they selling stolen goods and hiding behind innocent people?

I’m pretty sure that I’m going to pass on this, but I’m curious as to what they might be trying to pull.

Is this an obvious enough scam that it should be reported to eBay or to the authorities, or might I be causing trouble for a couple of innocent but somewhat incompetent businessmen?

2

My husband, who has been an ebay seller for 10+ years, has received unsolicited offers of this nature a few times, making me think it’s a not-quite-common-but-recognized-scam. The explanation I remember for needing someone else’s account was that their own location had a bad reputation and no one wanted to buy from them. It’s up to you whether you want to let ebay know. It’s always hard to tell if they care or act on reports like this.

3

Tell them that you’ll hold the money until you receive feedback from the buyer that they’re happy with the item. If they’re uncomfortable being the left on the hook, ask them why they came to you expecting you to do so.

4

I’m not even sure what I’d report.These guys (or this one guy, as I suspect) may not even have an eBay account. If they do, I have no way of identifying it in order to report it anyway.

I think this is something that I’m just going to have to let go.

Maybe I’ll offer to help them get their account unsuspended in exchange for some percentage of future sales. It would be interesting to see the response to that.

5

I like that.

6

FWIW, it sounds entirely plausible to me. More than a year ago I had my account suspended for a stupid reason. I have repeatedly tried to contact them and been unable to get any response from them other than a standard letter. There doesn’t appear to be any way of appealing against a suspension. And I had a second account that was also suspended. They are able to recognise the connection between the accounts.

Quite likely, they are not trying to scam you. Quite likely they are victims of eBay policy, like me, and trying to find some way around an unfair situation.

That said, you are right not to let them sell through your account. You would indeed be liable for any mistakes they made, you would have to refund any lost items, etc. Certainly not a good idea.

If you really have a way to do that, I’d be very happy if you could help me with my problem.

7

I don’t know if I have a way or not, but I thought that I could give it a try. But your experience does give me pause. It may just not be possible.

Hey, if you want, PM me, make me an offer, and then only pay up if I can help you get your account back.

I’m afraid that you’re probably right about the dangers of selling through my own account. Even if these guys are totally honest, any screwup on the part of them or their suppliers, or even UPS, could end up falling on me. Although, babygoat666 may be onto something with his idea of holding the money until I see feedback stating that the item was received. They tell me that they have thousands of dollars of merchandise on hand that they’re trying to sell, so presumably they’d be able to ship without receiving the money first. Whether or not they’d be willing to do that is another question.

8

Selling on behalf of someone who has been banned from eBay is more than likely some sort of policy violation - of course, eBay may never detect or discover it, then again, they might - and you’ll get sucked down the same hole as them.

However, I think it’s more likely this is either an outright scam - i.e. they plan to funnel a large value of sales through you, then disappear with the money, without ever having shipped anything.

Or it could just be that their products are poor quality or poor sellers - and they want you to bear the cost of listing things that never sell, and you to be responsible for refunding returns.

9

If they were legitimate this is what they’d be offering to do.

10

No way in hell would I do it even under those conditions. This scam’s been around for a while. The version I’ve read is that he’s selling stolen goods, or more likely stuff bought with a stolen credit card. He has you list an ipod, say, at a very good price; when someone buys it, the scammer buys it off some other website with a stolen credit card and has it shipped to the buyer.

Only when it all falls apart, you’re the seller of record, so it’s your door the police show up at.

11

That they would sacrifice a chunk of profit vs the relatively trivial task of starting a new account is a huge red flag. There’s more to this story than they are telling you.

12

That’s pretty much what I’m thinking. The whole thing screams scam.

13

Their claim is that eBay detected the connection when they tried this and shut them down, a process corroborated by Peter Morris above.

14

If your business is at stake getting a new internet modem, or a new line and a brand new account and changing your IP address so you are “new” to ebay’s IP address detection software is hardly rocket science or all that expensive.

15

It’s not that easy. eBay is on the lookout for duplicates of banned accounts. The admins of The Straight Dope are pretty good at detecting them. eBay is probably better.

You would need, at minimum, a new IP address, email, postal address and paypal account. Even then, I wouldn’t like to bet on fooling them.

16

Since PayPal is owned by eBay if you try to link a new PayPal account to the same bank account, they may be able to detect you that way.

That said, this thing is a little too iffy for my tastes. I don’t want to be unknowingly involved in laundering money or selling stolen goods, or even covering for someone’s bad eBay rep.

17

I found this link which seems to at least lightly explain the hoops to jump through to get back in eBay’s good graces.

The person that contacted you and Peter may have already tried this, and it does look like eBay is a hardass where suspensions are concerned, but it’s a place to start anyway,

18

You could contact your local police department fraud unit. Explain to them what you told us. Maybe, just maybe they might want you to set up a sting.

Consider contacting the US Postal Service Postal Inspectors. They might be in a better position to help because if your “new friends” ship via the mail system it’s federal mail fraud. Postal Inspectors have quite a few more contacts than local police.

19

FIRST of all, if they are already using other people’s eBay accounts to sell their products, then why are they trying to get your eBay account to use. It only takes ONE account to sell stuff.

SECOND, here’s the scam: They sell two, three or four small items, maybe $10 each at most. Maybe they sell a few small items on a few occasions. The idea is to create trust. Then, they hit you. They have an item that goes for $800, $1,500, maybe several thousand dollars. But, there is no item. It sells, YOUR bank account is linked to the eBay account, because it is YOUR eBay account, you are paid by the buyer. You are trusting and not all that experienced and it doesn’t occur to you to wait until the buyer is happy and has told you that and has left positive feedback, so you pay these con men their share. The buyer waits and waits, then opens an “item not received case”. You can’t prove the item was sent and your “partners in crime” all of a sudden fail to communicate well. They say they sent it and they don’t show proof and ignore all questions and requests to show proof. They play stupid. If you requested proof of delivery or something like that to begin with, they will simply say they forgot and, instead, just mailed it. eBay will zap your bank account and refund the buyer, who is entitled to every penny back. Your eBay reputation/feedback will suddenly go all to H___ and you will be out thousands and thousands of dollars. You can bet that the timing will be such that several big ticket items will be used as the con all in a very short period of time, to maximize gain. Obviously, they can’t pull off this scam on the same person for weeks or months on end. However, it could cost you thousands of dollars, especially if they decide to sell a car (a non-existent one).

BESIDES, eBay deducts their fees right out of our bank account so if these con men didn’t have the small eBay fee to cover the huge amount of money they took in with their sales, then they deliberately intended to rip of eBay and deserved a suspended account. For example, I sell 10 items. Total paid to me on those items is $500. eBay’s fees are about $20 odd dollars. They are claiming there was a “lapsed fee”. These people are claiming they totally emptied their bank account and didn’t even leave $20 for eBay fees for the $500 they just pocketed?

ONE LAST RED FLAG, there are two con men. Did both of them screw up with eBay this way, because eBay accounts are one-person accounts. They both used themselves to rip off people or rip off eBay. That’s twice. Yet, it sounds like they are claiming they have a joint eBay account. I believe eBay accounts are individual accounts or are in one name. FURTHER, eBay is quick to fix things, quick to respond - I have been happy with them and impressed with their speed in getting to things and their quick understanding of situations.

A seller recently tried to rip me off on an item of about $160+. I returned it because it was not as described and the part that would show was ruined and non-repairable. The item was just garbage. Seller claimed she never received it back (it was insured tracked) and she also refused to have the post office track it or put in a claim. She accused me of wanting her to commit postal fraud. I emailed her - “Since when is asking the post office to track a package or put in a claim, postal fraud?”. I said a whole lot more than that to her. She escalated the case with eBay accusing me of other things as well but, she also sounded like a crazy woman. eBay recognized it RIGHT AWAY and promptly refunded my money. Hours had not even passed. I did not even need to respond. These con men are trying to give eBay a bad reputation by saying what they have said. It is clear to me that they are con men. STAY CLEAR & don’t believe anything they say about eBay.

20

All due respect you may or may not realize that eBay is often very proactive with helping buyers, they are not nearly as proactive with assisting sellers unless the facts are cut and dried in the sellers favor. I have sold over 2700+ items over 13 years on eBay, with excellent feedback ratings and I know whereof I speak.