I just tried to sell a computer on eBay and what happened? I got scammed. No, I didn’t lose any money, I’m too Internet geeky to get scammed that hard, but what did happen was this.
1. Over the 10 day auction I got 41 eBay messages asking me if they “could buy it outside of eBay and ship it to the UK/Nigeria/Australia etc…”
Um, no you can’t.
2. During the last half hour of the auction, two UK bidders bid it from $1500 (the top value price really) to $5k.
Here’s what I think is going on. These a-hole fake bidders drive up the bid price for several reasons.
1. Because they think that if they big way over what the value of the item is, the seller will be stupid enough to get so excited that they’ll agree to ship the item before being paid. (Probably works sometimes)
2. They drive up the bids to ruin the auction for my item so that there are more real bidders to bid on their stuff.
All I know is this. I hate eBay right now.
To make matters worse now, eBay has “cancelled” my auction less than 24-hours after it ended. I can’t even view/find the auction. I wanted to go back and do a second chance offer to one of the real bidders, but now I can’t even do that.
Dear eBay,
I hate you.
Love,
Jim Kukral
LOL my friend had similar experience with eBay scammers from Nigeria. And I agree that the worst perpetrator would be eBay, they never clean up their own mess. You might want to try blind auctions on your next online auctions on eBay.
Here’s the email I got back from eBay customer support to explain what happened.
I fully understand the importance of this matter to you and I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. After reading your email I immediately and thoroughly reviewed your account for you and found out that we cancelled your listing after determining that bidding activity on your item took place without the account owner’s authorization. In order to limit the negative impact to you and the account owner, we temporarily suspended the bidding account and ended
the listing in question.
Jim, I am happy to report to you that I have now credited the $94.5 fee for your notebook and rest assured that any negative actions resulting from this listing, including unpaid item reports and negative feedback are taken care of. We encourage you to list your item again, either through the Sell Your Item process or through your third-party listing service.
If you need further assistance, please don’t hesitate to reply to this email and let us know.
Sincerely,
Gale
eBay Customer Support
I’ve had the exact same experience – twice – when trying to sell a laptop. First, lots of junk/spam emails, to which I do not respond, but instead dutifully report to eBay (not that it seems to make a difference.) Then the auction proceeds normally until, during the last minute of bidding, the item is bid up to an astronomical amount. (Like $4000 for a $400 laptop.)
I tried to cancel the bids, but eBay’s bid cancellation process is cumbersome, involving collecting the id of the bidder, the number of the item being sold, and submitting both on a separate page from the auction. (Hello? How about a simple button next to each bid – the seller can just click it to cancel the bid and block future bids from that user id.)
These bids were apparently placed by longtime eBay members with good feedback, but they were obviously fakes. In the end, the entire auction was cancelled and I was refunded all of my listing fees. Obviously I’m glad for that, but I seriously doubt I’ll try to sell anything on eBay again.