I have recently been BURNED to the tune of $599 by an eBayer. I may or may not recover the funds, but he is running the same scam even as we speak with others.
I can watch the items he is selling. But can I watch items on which he is bidding? He ripped me off buying something FROM me and I would like to warn others if I can.
THANKS!
have you filed a complaint with eBay yet?
How would someone take you for $599 by buying something from you?
I had airline vouchers. He sent me $599 via paypal and I had the vouchers changed into his name.
Later that day I was sent an email by paypal that I was in the receipt of “fraudulent” funds and that they had been reversed.
The tickets were in his name adn the flight was the next day. There was no way to resolve it before he used the tix.
I then received several emails from other users warning me of the SAME tactics and to beware. But it was too late.
You can search by bidder in the advanced search option.
What did PayPal say?
I would suggest using escrow for high cost items in the future.
I don’t know of any way to see what others are bidding on, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t such an ability. It’d be a violation of privacy to let any user look at another’s bidding history.
Let eBay know about your incident, and be sure to leave some negative feedback behind. Many sellers will not accept bids from users with excessive negative feedback, and any seller worth his beans will check out his bidders when it’s a high cost item on the auction block. Leaving feedback behind is the best way to let others know about your experience with another user.
If you had e-mailing other sellers about his history in mind, then I would recommend you don’t. I suppose it’d depend on how much you do it and how you word your warning, but I can see how that could be construed as harassment and get you warned by eBay. I think it’s admirable that you’re trying to keep others from getting burned by this guy, but there are smarter ways to keep eBay safe from scum like him.
http://pages.ebay.com/search/items/search_bidder.html and then enter the bidders name and hit the magic button.
You should be able to see whatever this bidder has bid upon.
HTH.
C@W.
THANKS!
You can check another person’s bidding history for the past 30 days using the link Caught@Work provided. If a bidder doesn’t like having their history available for all to see, then they can choose to bid only on private auctions. But there are plenty of good reasons why that information is not generally kept private (Just like feedback). Think how much easier it would be for bidders to abuse the system if you didn’t have access to their history. Shill bidding, bid retraction abuse, chronic nonpayers, the list goes on.
Sellers also have the ability to block bidders from their future auctions–the link can be found on your “My eBay” page. Highly recommended in cases like this.
How was that buyers feedback?
28 Positive
1 Negative with a good explanation by him
Ebay has a nice Community Forum you could post in.
Point conceded on the bidding history/privacy thing. Guess it’s just one of those bits of privacy that honest folks surrender when they share a community with dishonest folks.
Since the buyer had mostly positives in his feedback despite the OP’s and apparently others’ experience, I think even more so now that you should leave negative feedback and describe your experience. I wouldn’t wait until a bid was made to warn other sellers.
I have seen a couple of stories of people with thousands of positive feedbacks running away with the money. It’s rare. If someone pulls something like this then its your duty to put neg feedback to protect others.