Most anyone who lives in the civilized word has heard of ebay by now. It is a great place for buying and selling used or new items and anyone is invited. Some people have made careers out of selling on ebay.
Unfortunately, the scam artists have also discovered ebay as a great place to steal people’s money and property. So, I decided to devote this article to showing you how to conduct business safely on ebay. Of course, there is never a way to be 100% sure somebody won’t rip you off. But if you learn the tricks of the scammers, you’ll stand very little chance of that.
Tip#1 – I can’t stress this enough. Anytime you receive an email from ebay, do not reply to it; do not click any links in that email. You need to assume the message is fake until proven otherwise. It is sad, but there are so many phishing schemes out there that are sending out fake ebay messages, you have to take this approach. So how do you verify the email? Easy – Just login to ebay using your own bookmark or by typing www.ebay.com into the browser URL bar. Once you’ve logged in, check your “my ebay” section and look at your inbox. If the same message is not present in the inbox here, then you can be sure the one you received was fake.
Tip#2 – If you are selling on ebay, be very careful of international buyers, especially from Nigeria. Often they will bid on your items and win then even if you specifically state that you will not ship overseas. Then they’ll send you an email saying that they’ll take care of the shipping for you. If this should happen, report the incident to ebay immediately. You can bet 99% of the time, this is a scam. If you follow through with it, you will loose the item you were selling along with the money you thought they had paid you. They will pay with fraudulent funds that will be retracted by the bank well after you’ve shipped the item off to Nigeria.
Tip#3 – Never allow anyone to pay you more money than what the auction ended for. They will often play games where they ask you to send back the extra amount. What they are doing is paying you in fraudulent funds while you pay them back with legitimate funds.
Tip#4 – Don’t ever deal with zero-feedback bidders or sellers on expensive items. Everybody has to start somewhere, so I’d say not to worry about them if it is a $10 item. After all, scammers usually go for higher priced things. But for expensive items, just cancel the bid if you are a seller. If you are a buyer, just find a different auction.
Tip#5 – Check people’s feedback before buying or selling with them. Don’t just look at the rating. A 100% positive feedback rating is meaningless if the person only has 1 or 2 auctions in their history. What you need to do to be sure they are real is look at the actual auctions. For example, if the buyer/seller only has 2 feedbacks and they are both recent and both around $1 or less for the item, you can bet the person is a fraud. Often they will setup multiple accounts on ebay and sell themselves a few $1 items to generate some feedback. If still in doubt, check the other users they have transacted with. What kind of feedback do they have? Also look at how long the person has been a member. If it has only been a few days or weeks, then beware.
Tip#6 – Be very cautious about receiving “Second Chance Offers.” Ebay actually does allow this. What happens is a user sells an item on ebay but the buyer never pays. So the seller can try selling it again, or offer the item to the next highest bidder as a second chance offer. Unfortunately, 99% of these second chance offers are fraudulent. What really winds up happening is that somebody saw the auction and took down the information of what you had bid on and what amount. When the auction was over, they emailed you a fake email that appears to be from ebay giving you a second chance offer. Typically they will just tell you to send the money to a specific email address (this should be your first clue) instead of completing the transaction through ebay. If you send them money, you will never get it back, nor will you ever receive the product. Best thing to do, as I mentioned before, is always log onto to ebay to check your inbox there. Only messages in your “my ebay” inbox are from ebay and can be trusted.
Tip#7 – Don’t use the same username on ebay as you do for your email address. For example, if you email address is johndoe@yahoo.com, then don’t use johndoe for your ebay account name. Here is the reason for this. If a person sees an auction and they want to send you a fake second chance offer, or other phishing email, how do they find your email address? Well, they don’t because ebay won’t give it out to just anyone. So if they see your name is johndoe then they automatically send the fake email to johndoe@yahoo.com, along with johndoe@gmail.com and johndoe@hotmail.com. You get the idea. By using different names, you’ll never even receive the vast majority of the fake emails.
Then there are some other things to be careful of. They aren’t necessarily scams, but they are designed to mislead you sometimes:
Tip #8 – Always check the shipping cost for an item you are bidding on. It has become extremely common for people to list an item for sale for $1 but charge $30 to ship something that really should cost $2. This isn’t illegal, but often people forget to look past the bid amount.
Tip #9 – Lookout for AS-IS merchandise. Typically if somebody sells something As-IS, that almost always means it is broken. If the item says it is “untested” or “unknown condition” then the same applies. Lets face it, most people are going to test items to see if they work. They know that a properly working item sells for more than one being sold as “untested.” There are times this may be true as in the case of unusual computer equipment that the average person doesn’t have the ability to test. But something simple like a DVD player should be tested. Otherwise, assume it doesn’t work. There is nothing wrong with selling broken stuff on ebay as lots of people like to buy things at a cheap price to repair them or use for parts. But sometimes the unscrupulous sellers like to widen the audience to people who just don’t know any better.
Tip#10 – Don’t ever assume or believe when an auction mentions the retail value of an item. Often they will come up with these numbers out of thin air. So if they say this camcorder sells new for $599, but you can buy-it-now for a mere $399, it might sound like a good deal. That is, until you discover that your local Wal-Mart sells the exact same item for $249. So always do your homework on items before buying them. Some people make a living off of buying things at Wal-Mart and re-selling them for more money.
Tip#11 – My last tip. This really has nothing to do with ebay, but is very useful for new sellers. If you sell something on ebay, pack it well. When UPS and Fedex say they recommend 6 inches of padding on all sides of the item, they mean it. Those boxes go through a nightmare getting from your house to your buyer’s house. There is nothing more irritating to find out that it arrived broken. Guess what else? All shipping companies, including the US Postal Service are notorious about denying claims for broken products on the grounds that it wasn’t packed well, or failing that, they’ll claim you cannot prove the value of the item. (Ebay sales don’t count as proof of value!!!) In fact, I’ve found shipping insurance to be completely useless unless the item is completely lost and undelivered. So if you are unsure of how well the item should be packed, think of it this way: You should be able to throw the box off of the roof of your house, and the item inside remain unharmed. Then you should be able to stand on top of the box without harming the item inside. If both of those are true, then it is probably packed well enough.
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