eBay A-Go-Go

By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics and access other forums reserved for members. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today by clicking here.

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 28 Oct 2008 Posts: 2

Greetings programs!

I got a scam attempt yesterday morning, posted about it elsewhere in the world, and a friend pointed me to your lovely site. I've been harassing scammers in various ways for many years, my favorite being to pretend to be a powerful Voodoun priest/ess and cast a curse on them that for every dollar they scam out of an innocent victim, they'll lose a day of their lives and that a friend or relative will die within the month to prove the validity of the curse. Since I sent out so many of these, the odds are good that at least one of the scammers might possibly have had a relative die and given up scamming in fear of the "curse". I'll never know, will I?

Anyway, eBay scam. I won a reasonably high-ticket auction for some rough (uncut) gemstones in the late hours of Sunday evening and received a whole set of scam e-mails in the wee hours of Monday morning. These purported to be the seller suggesting that his PayPal account had been compromised and therefore temporarily suspended and that the only authorized transaction for this situation was for me to send the cash by Western Union. Even told me that I should deduct the WU fees from the total and send the balance! I received one personal e-mail, two "notification" e-mails pretending to be from eBay, and one "TOS explanation" e-mail also "from eBay" showing where the "only choice" for situations where the PayPal account had been suspended was to use Western Union.

Funny thing was, the stones were being sold directly from the miner. The scammer lives in Spain. The miner lives in Australia. A basic check of the auction and/or the seller's profile would tell you this information. How dumb can you get?

My response was to insist that I could not pay the amount via Western Union because they had once ripped me off, but I would be happy to wire the money directly from my bank account to theirs if they would only give me the account information, or they could also accept a certified cheque. Their response, of course, was to play dumb and reiterate the Western Union mantra.

I got a (certainly fake) name, physical address, and two e-mail addresses, both of which were functional, but no additional information, sorry to say. I reported one addy to it's host and I'm certain that one has been shut down. The other appeared to be a private domain.

What confuses me is that my e-mail addy is NOT in my eBay profile. The only connection I can make is that they both share the same name. Do you think the scammer might have just sent e-mails out to every domain they could come up with featuring the name? So, [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], etc? My other thought was that perhaps they knew the e-mail from the fact that I bought something from them at one time and they just happened upon my name on that particular auction. Not that I remember buying anything from Spain, but people can always move house and my eBay account dates back to 2001, so it's possible I've forgotten.

Anybody have any enlightenment? I've not read enough of the forum posts to know if this has happened to anybody else, but I didn't find anything on a quick skim. Forgive me if somebody's posted something very similar lately; I'm a n00b, we're not always on the ball. Smile

Cheese!

-Cat-

Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2008 3:38 pm

Are the gemstones and amount of your winning bid actually mentioned in the emails, or do they just refer to "the item" and "the amount"?
It's possible that a scammer has sent out so many identical emals that the chances of one being received by a winning Ebayer are quite high.

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 28 Oct 2008 Posts: 2

The actual auction number and winning amount were listed. They took screencaps from the actual auction and edited actual eBay e-mails and had everything listed perfectly. If I didn't know better, I would think they were the Seller. It was an extremely elaborate set-up, making me think I'm almost certainly not the only person they've scammed. The only issue was some of the English was not completely perfect, but to the point that it could be put down to the occasional typo.

Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2008 11:25 pm

Actually in the article about the Romos doing these sane scams, yes they will may send out emails to that name and try most every common domain name with it hoping to get one to go through on it.

Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2008 6:30 am

Firstly, As you will know when E-Bay e-mail you, they use your sign up name, Which is known only to them. It's not public. NOT your e-bay user name, in the e-mail.

Quote:

eBay sent this message to xxxx xxxx username in brackets Your registered name is included to show this message originated from eBay.

If the e-mail does not show your sign-up name then it's FAKE

E-bay only send an e-mail to say you have bid, lost or won an item. In the case of a winning bid, your asked to pay.

E-bay have banned Western Union and Moneygram, And your first option is always Pay Pal.

I buy a considerable amount of Music CD's and Music DVD's so I can speak about there buying procedures. Could you perhaps post the offending e-mail, and remove any of your personal details first.

Or PM it to me. and I will reply with a private opinion

E-Bay take Scamming of there customer base very seriously, and will take a lot of notice to this sort of report. And while we all know that getting through to E-bay and attempting to use there electronic
generated minefield can be a real pain. Simply click there dispute
link on "your Account" page and follow the links

Posted: Mon Nov 10, 2008 4:39 am

I'll back up wearborg on this, I am an eBay powerseller and anything mentioning WU will be a scam.

Feebay own Paypal and generally push it to the limit. In some sites around the world it is against the TOS for sellers not to accept Paypal for payment. There was a scandal earlier in the year where Paypal tried to restrict all payment on their Australian site to paypal only.

Anything FeeBay that mentions WU, moneygram etc will be a scam and eBay do take it seriously, I've reported a few.