I've had a rash of scammers trying to lure me into phony sales lately. Seems they are really trolling the more expensive acoustic guitar auctions. One contacted me with a with bogus offer within a day of posting a bid and several days before an auction even ends. The two most recent were offers through hijacked accounts of sellers with very good ebay histories and active accounts. If you are bidding on anything on ebay watch out for requests to contact the seller at an email address outside of ebay. :POL> I always report these to ebay security but their security is as lame as their buyer protection. Anybody want a Collings OM2H for US$1000 or a H&D OM for US900? :SHK>
what jimmyd said. yeppers....
When in doubt trade email with the seller, or better yet telephone them. Even then you might get snaked...
that being said, I've bought half of my collection off ebay.
Yea, if they pay with paypal ALWAYS ship to the paypal verified address, no others. I have heard of scams where they will ask you to ship to a non verified address and then they call their credit card company to put a stop on the payment after they recieve the item. PayPal can't do anything to get you your money back since you didn't ship to a verified address.
I think if don't make any special exceptions for anyone you are usually pretty safe if you follow everything by the books.
Unfortunately, you can't really trust most second-chance offers on ebay these days. I always ask for a phone number and drop a dime (I guess its more like 2 quarters now) before doing any deal like that.
E. Shoaf
Some guy tried to scam me on a beautiful Martin a few months ago. That was before I was born again with Larrivee. Anyway it was something like a 45 model and it was fantastic. I dropped out of the bidding when the price got crazy and sure enough a day or so after the auction ended I got a second chance offer to buy it at $900 or so. The finished auction amount was somewhere around 3 grand. I was very skeptical and wrote an email asking how I could be so lucky when there were at least 9 other bids higher than mine. This guy said that they all dropped out and bought something else.
I wrote an email to the winner and he told me that the guitar was sitting right in his living room as he typed his reply to me. We all have that hope that one day the gods will shine down on us and let us find the deal of the century. That is what those leeches try to blind us with. Sometimes they succeed, that is what they hope for...the occasional sucker.
Finalannsa
One thing I have learned (nearly the hard way) is once the auction you are bidding on has ended an you've won, ALWAYS do the "request contact info" to make sure the person listed with Ebay is the same person (and address you are dealing with) The "hijacked" account mentioned above can be sniffed out in this way.....
Thank you all for this info...I had no idea. Is this fairly common?
Quote from: inspector13 on February 28, 2006, 11:29:32 PM
Thank you all for this info...I had no idea. Is this fairly common?
for every new "venue" we have to purchase things online, there are 10 new ways to scam folks out of their hard earned money....so yes, it's very common unfortunately.....
The only shame about ebay it's ebay itself. I mean, they don't mind a freaking thing if someone gets screwed. I've been enough lucky to meet a very nice guy to buy my Larrivées from who owns a store, so I made the transaction directly with him outside the damn thing.
Feedback option? Nah, it doesn't mean virtually anything. More, since sometime people trade feedback instead stuff: sort of "if you leave a nice feedb' to me I'll leave one for ya". Can it be serious? At all. And what about spoof emails tryin' to steal your account and pass? Nobody at ebay minds about it. Just the usual automated email, the automated reply, automated advice and so on. I'd just wish these ebay invisible guys would get automated invisible money...