The “Break it Down” Blog

Note: Pheebay has put up an excellent article to learn how to spot scams on eBay. Great tips.

This is the second time I’ve been scammed on eBay in the last year and it’s starting to drive me a little crazy.

The first time I was a seller and the person won a monitor from me and asked me to send it to the philipines C.O.D. While I’m normally not a suspicious person, I *did* point out that due to the weight and location of where they were asking me to ship it, the item ($150) was going to have a $211 shipping charge. They (of course) said that was “no problem at all and they really wanted the item”… I decided to sit on my decision for a few days and remind them that I wasn’t shipping anything until my PayPal account had been paid. Needless to say after not responding for days, I started to get more demanding with a response, so they promptly canceled their account on eBay.

They had a 100% positive feedback of 10 or 11.

Now about 3 weeks ago I bid on an won a used copy of Virtua Tennis 3 for the PS3. To make a long story short, for 2 weeks I tried to get a reply of what was going on or where my item was from the seller modartdesign (Name: “Todd Tomlinson”, Email: todd2zrescue@hotmail.com). I never got a single reply and he continued to get feedback on items he was “selling”. After I left negative feedback and finally started the retraction process with PayPal low-and-behold-the-gods, I get a message from him saying:

sorry i do not check into ebay that often. I just recived notice from ebay you did not recieve the item. as you can see from my recent feed back I sold 1 other ps3 game. I shipped out both of them on the same day “Priorty Mail” and have the reciept to show that I did so. The post office shows that the package was delievered

Ok no problem, so I asked my friend modartdesign to send me copies of all these pieces of proof he had and let him know that if I didn’t hear from him by Friday I would escalate my claim with PayPal. At this point he did the only logical thing: he cancelled his eBay account. I can imagine the reason was because of my negative feedback… which now makes his ability to scam people that much harder.

He had previously had 100% positive feedback of 11.

Are you starting to see the trend here? What bothers me is just how (apparently) easy it is to create these shell accounts. Let’s hope that PayPal doesn’t earn it’s reputation for being a shell-game itself.

Update #1: Are you fucking kidding me? How does eBay still function with stuff like this…

• How To Spot Scam Listings on Ebay
• Free Positive Feedback On eBay
• New trick for eBay fraudsters
• Possible eBay scam artist takes $1000s from people and fails to deliver
• Ebay lets sellers make up their own positive feedback
• New eBay scam fleeces buyers by hijacking auctions