ebay - Nigerian Scammers
Although I have had problems in the past with ebay, I have given it a long while before having another go with them. We have a couple items to sell in order to fund the purchase of a new iPhone 3Gs both of which sold to buyers from the U.K. with no problems.
Because of this success we decided to put one of our digital cameras on ebay too as we had started to collect them ! This time we were targeted by Nigerian scammers and if you read the message boards and blogs you will understand that these low lifes are endemic on ebay. Fortunately I smelled a rat immediately and before they could deregister (they register and deregister on the same day as the auction ends normally) I tracked the address they used which happened to be a bonafide one for a Plumbing company in California.
They bombarded me with fake e-mails , including fake PayPal headings etc. One big clue is the spelling and grammar in the mails, particularly the one supposedly from PayPal. It was so diabolical we just sat and laughed.
Actually, it's not a laugh really because some naive person could be fooled by it. After a few days of completely ignoring their mails and holding our stomachs from too much laughing they seem to have finally given up sending me these mails.
What also is not funny is that ebay and PayPal (which ebay owns) seems to be doing jack all to stop it. I guess after the inconvenience this causes people some may decide not to use ebay again. So if I was you ebay and PayPal I would get up from your comfortable arses and do something about it for the sake of your customers and your future business!
Finally, to anyone who is looking to use ebay for the first time I would urge you to type into a search engine "ebay Nigerian Scammers" and read all the entries about it before you make a move to post your item on ebay and for gods sake take the advice given or else someone could be sitting in Nigeria laughing their socks off clutching your "camera" and the money you expected for it !
posted by Wolf Man at 11:58 am
1 Comments:
Hello from Transatlantia! Oh well, California, USA then :-)
Searching for tidbits about Arthur Brown brought me here-not even sure why I was doing THAT..too much coffee? Ha ha..
Excellent post. I myself have had a few bad experiences with eBay, mostly as a buyer. As a seller, I use the presets in eBay listings to screen potential bidders VERY finely. This works well at keeping most troublemakers at an arm's length.
I started out as a seller with a very helpful & generous attitude but found in the end that I wasn't helping myself OR the best potential customers by putting up with the time wasters and the just plain loony folks out there. No one who's ever contacted me about modding the terms of my auctions (and I have done so infrequently) has ever ended up bidding on or buying anything from me.
One very pleasant discovery I've made since I started on eBay has been the international community. I've purchased successfully in the UK, Hong Kong, and Canada. I've sold to buyers in Germany, Italy, French Canada, Hong Kong, the Netherlands & Brazil. All were great experiences. Sadly enough, my only bad experiences as a buyer or seller have been with eBay members in the USA-and they were all on the Eastern seaboard. So much for all the flakes being in California. Ah well..
My biggest gripe is with the fees BayPal charges..for everything! You could write an entire book about that..but I won't. (g)
Take care, and keep on truckin'!
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