EBay second chance offer Scam

[Stephen Williams]

Hi,

 

This is a new one to me.

 

I bid £1001 for an item, the bidding went to £20,100 reserve not met. I received a buy it now offer for £1001 with immediate payment. I did not try to see what would happen! reported to spoof@ebay.com, they confirmed it was fake.

 

Stephen

[Tim Carroll]

Hi,

 

This is a new one to me.

 

I bid £1001 for an item, the bidding went to £20,100 reserve not met. I received a buy it now offer for £1001 with immediate payment. I did not try to see what would happen! reported to spoof@ebay.com, they confirmed it was fake.

 

Stephen

 

Stephen,

 

We had a long thread on this in the "16mm only" forum. It is a big scam on big ticket items. Had this happen on a number of cameras in the past. Somebody posts and auction, sometimes a complete fake auction, with a high reserve and when the auction is over, the seller has access to all the bidder's eBay accounts and many times their email addresses as well. Then they send each bidder a "second chance offer" and try to scam as much money as possible before they disappear.

 

EBay has pretty much become a "den of theives". Maybe it has always been.

 

-Tim

[Guest]

A second chance offer on the IIIC I bought on ebay almost cost me $4100.00. I was very close to sending the guy the money but there where grammatical errors in the "ebay" e-mail he sent me, I thought for sure ebay would not make such mistakes. Sure enough ebay confirmed it was a spoof, but boy did the guy do a nice job on the e-mail. If these overseas crooks want to increase their odds of taking in people here they should learn to write English properly. This guy was hiding out in the UK some place.

 

ebay really isn't doing very much to combat this problem, they don't care. It will take a large class action settlement against ebay to get them to clean up their act.

 

In the mean time I still use ebay to buy and sell gear. If I'm buying I don't send any funds for large value items until I have spoken with the seller on the phone and I have a fax copy of his drivers license.

 

Of course the only guaranteed way to not get burned is to use an escrow service of some kind.

 

R,

[Matt Pacini]

I don't think ebay is ever going to "clean up its act." They've certainly had enough time to deal with this type of fraud.

I think their view is, they've warned people about scams, and if you fall for one, it's your fault.

I've been pretty lucky, but I NEVER correspond outside of the "contact buyer" or "contact seller" function on ebay, and I won't send to an address that's not on the ebay invoice, because I know that people do these scams.

 

MP