tbmaddux's Journal: eBay Scam Report

So I recently sold off a bunch of computer stuff on eBay (see previous entry) including a PowerBook G4/667. The PowerBook was the first item I've sold for a decent amount of money (say, over a couple hundred dollars), everything before that was software, peripherals, graphics cards, that sort of thing. It attracted a lot of attention, including some from scammers.

I probably got contacted about 20 different times by some sort of person looking to scam me after the auction started. Invariably it was someone who wanted to circumvent the eBay auction system. Just about all of them wanted me to end the auction and sell to them directly without going through eBay... these people rarely had an eBay feedback profile.

In my auction I clearly stated that I would take particular kinds of payments (PayPal, cashier's check, or money order) and that I would only ship to the U.S. (PayPal only protects your sale if you ship to the U.S.) and to a PayPal "confirmed address" (again PayPal only protects your sale if you ship to a confirmed address). So many of the contacts wanted me to ship internationally. And many of them wanted me to either ship to an address other than the PayPal confirmed one, or to an international address (a "friend" or "relative" in Indonesia, or South America). Lastly, several of them wanted to just email me the CC#, as if I were some kind of business or, more likely, a fool.

Now, I have nothing against Indoneisans or Russians or South Americans. But why can't they just ship it to their "friend/relative" themselves, hm? I would politely bring this up and never hear back. So obviously what we're dealing with here is people sitting on stolen CC's and looking to convert them to useful product. They didn't want shipping to go to the confirmed address because that address was not theirs.

In the end, I sold the PowerBook for more money than any of the questionable offers I received. I do not interact with eBay a lot, but I have found that it works pretty well within the system, especially as a seller, and that most of the scammers appear to be working either outside the system or are a small enough fraction of the total population that they don't have much impact on the inside.