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EBay Scam
From a newsletter I subscribe to. Though it worth passing along...
Today's focus: Watch out for this eBay fraud technique By M. E. Kabay Longtime friend and colleague Stephen Cobb sends the following warning about an auction-related scam ("I" refers to Stephen throughout and names have been changed to avoid lawsuits): * * * In early April, I failed to win an auction for an $800/£420 item by just a few pounds. The item was listed by someone in South Gloucestershire, England. I think the listing itself was entirely legitimate. A few days later I was contacted via eBay e-mail, supposedly by the seller, saying: "You expressed interest in Item number 6165275772 by bidding, however the auction has ended with another member as the high bidder. In compliance with eBay policy, the seller of that item is making this Second Chance Offer to you at your bid price of £415.00. The seller has issued this Second Chance Offer because the winning bidder was unable to complete the transaction." However, the name associated with this message, "Dave Alabaz," did not seem to match the lister of the item (far722 - but those names are sometimes obscure). When I contacted Dave via his Yahoo e-mail address he asked for my mailing address. I felt this made him sound legit and gave it to him (it is not exactly a secret) along with an offer to pay him via PayPal. But he turned this down, telling me to follow instructions in the message that I would get from eBay. I did then receive e-mail from aw-confirm@ebay.com stating, "You have agreed to purchase the following eBay item from far722 on Mar-29-05." The message asked me to pay through Western Union. The seller gave me the name and street address of the Western Union recipient as Patsy Alabaz, in London, not South Gloucestershire. Here is some of the e-mail: "Currently, this seller has a US$ 20,000.00 deposit in an eBay managed purchase protection account. Transactions with this eBay seller are covered by purchase protection against fraud and description errors. For your safety, this account was locked today, for 30 days time. The seller is unable to withdraw any money from it, within this period." This sounded fishy and the source of the HTML message looked fishy. One disguised link led to a login at Yahoo e-mail! So I went to the eBay Q&A forum and described this stuff. Everyone there shouted SCAM! Presumably this is perpetrated by someone watching the bidding for a high-end item, then hitting one or more "losers" with e-mail to their eBay bidding ID, correctly listing their losing bids and offering to sell them the exact same item. Quite enticing to a keen buyer, even though logic tells you that the scammer very definitely does not have the item - we are talking about serial-numbered items here - it went to the auction winner. But of course the weak link in any scam is getting the cash from the mark, and if this truly is a fraudulent transaction the scammer seems to be using Patsy Alabaz to get paid (a real person or an ironic pseudonym?). There may be another cutout in this scam that allows the scammer to get the money despite there being no Patsy at that address. But just in case it was worth pursuing, I passed the information along to the security folks at eBay. I did not reply to Mr. Alabaz but I'd like to think that eBay did, and arranged to have someone from Scotland Yard meet Patsy Alabaz when she went to collect payment. The simple lesson is don't fall for Second Chance offers. The bigger lesson is to think twice about buying big-ticket items over the Internet. A few days after the "Patsy" incident, I came across a Kubota tractor legitimately listed for sale on a tractor dealer's Web site, but fraudulently listed on eBay. The latter listing used the same photos but offered a much lower price, payable by money order to an address in Europe. When I contacted the real owner of the tractor he told me the Secret Service were already on the case. * * *
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Thanks For the heads up..
Boy ppl sure put alot of work into not working.. Scams.. Peace Troy
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This is a new twist to what I have experienced. Thanks for the heads-up!
My experience is clandestine in nature, too. Here's the rub. I've received "legitimate second chance" offers -- "legitimate" meaning they came from the actual seller at eBay. And the seller giving the "second chance" to me after the "winner" backed out. Or happens to have another identical item. And the seller even willing to accept PayPal, money orders, whatever. Where it becomes sneaky (and against eBay rules) is the second chance offer is at my bid. It should have been the next highest bid plus the minimum amount. It was discovered through my complaints to eBay that at least two of these characters had confidants making bogus last-second strikes at the auction. This meant the seller could extract the extra difference between the bid below mine plus the minimum and my actual bid. I don't remember what those differneces would have been in those two cases, but it amounted to about a $40 total in the four or five times it happened to me. |
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