Please explain the eBay scam to me...
Discussion
You know the type, they are all over the site. Obviously underpriced with a cheap buy it now.
So the buyer pays the money and nothing arrives. The buyer then claims a money back guarantee and gets a refund.
Where does the seller profit? Simply withdraw the money and do a runner? Who loses the money, ebay, a bank, an innocent party with a hacked account?
Example I just looked at 2 x Dewalt batteries which are £100 + at screwfix are up for £15 including delivery. They have sold thousands of pounds worth today alone!
So the buyer pays the money and nothing arrives. The buyer then claims a money back guarantee and gets a refund.
Where does the seller profit? Simply withdraw the money and do a runner? Who loses the money, ebay, a bank, an innocent party with a hacked account?
Example I just looked at 2 x Dewalt batteries which are £100 + at screwfix are up for £15 including delivery. They have sold thousands of pounds worth today alone!
Either fakes or a hijacked account, with the money quickly transferred out of PayPal I would have thought.
The car ones are almost always fishing for a deposit of some description.
ETA. Hopefully it's PayPal/Ebay that lose out as their response time to reporting fraudulent listings can stretch into weeks.
The car ones are almost always fishing for a deposit of some description.
ETA. Hopefully it's PayPal/Ebay that lose out as their response time to reporting fraudulent listings can stretch into weeks.
ChocolateFrog said:
Either fakes or a hijacked account, with the money quickly transferred out of PayPal I would have thought.
Yep, always this for the ones that aren't obvious. A friend of mine had his hacked and it was exactly what they did- a bunch of fake listings for DeWalt tools, buyers never received and the scammer tried to withdraw the funds to a similarly hijacked bank account.Quite hard to get the money transferred quickly out of PayPal as they like to sit on it for a little interest / or in case of refunds in a suspense account...
But lots of scammers blaming Coronavirus for slowdown in shipping, and then not sending it at all. They will mark it as dispatched, throw in a fake tracking number... but if you see something at such a knockdown price, or conversely too expensive on ebay, it's some sort of scam...
But lots of scammers blaming Coronavirus for slowdown in shipping, and then not sending it at all. They will mark it as dispatched, throw in a fake tracking number... but if you see something at such a knockdown price, or conversely too expensive on ebay, it's some sort of scam...
I saw a similar thing happening on Amazon. I was in the market for a top-of-the-line CPU for a discontinued socket because they were just becoming affordable. One came up so I bought it, paid for it and got a tracking number that didn't work. Waited a few days and contacted the seller. They asked me to wait a few days. I did but still nothing so I asked for a refund which was promptly, very promptly, given.
I later noticed another seller with the same item for a similar price, so I checked the seller account and they were also selling all myriad of different items. A few hours later the seller had disappeared.
My guess is money laundering, although I don't have a full theory of how it would work. Another theory is they are keeping enough cash for enough time to actually earn money from it by lending it.
I later noticed another seller with the same item for a similar price, so I checked the seller account and they were also selling all myriad of different items. A few hours later the seller had disappeared.
My guess is money laundering, although I don't have a full theory of how it would work. Another theory is they are keeping enough cash for enough time to actually earn money from it by lending it.
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