Don’t be fooled and scammed! Take heed of the following scams that target even the most reputable auction sites. Check out the top scams for 2017 below.
Buying a photograph scam
Yes! You read right! Buying a photograph of the product you want. This is a very frustrating scam to fall victim to. The item in the auction will be a product in high-demand on the market, like a Macbook or iPad. The buyer wins the auction but loses in the end because the product received is a printed photograph of the item listed. If one should dispute the sale, the response will be that the image is what the seller was really selling.
Wire transfer scams
This is not a new scam but one that seems to never disappear! If you don’t have the item you purchased yet (or if you don’t know if you will be unsatisfied with the product yet), then you leave yourself vulnerable to a scam when trying wire transfers. Therefore, secure your payments better by using the cash on collection option or PayPal.
Pretend PayPal payments
Most people selling a product will go ahead and ship off the product once they get a confirmation email from PayPal that the item has been paid for. However, if it’s a scam, the email will be from a fake PayPal address, and the customer will not have paid anything for the product. So if you go ahead and rely on the fake email, you will have shipped off the product to someone who has not paid for the product. To prevent being scammed by this technique, just check your actual PayPal balance to see if the money is there.
Imitation products
The buyer scams the seller by complaining that the items was broken upon arrival, when what they have done is actually swapped the item for a broken version of it The scammer sends the seller a picture of the item (like an iPhone) with an image of the product looking broken. The buyer claims the product was either broken to begin with or broke while being shipped. Because of the Buyer Protection Policy, eBay will make you pay the buyer back his/her money.
The postage and delivery scam
These scams occur when you plan on selling an item to be shipped. On the auction site, they have selected delivery but then the buyer contacts you saying her/she has changed his/her mind about having it shipped and wants to collect it instead. So you agree to deduct the postage fee when you meet after the buyer pays via PayPal. Now here’s where the scam comes in. The buyer waits a few days and then asks for a refund from PayPal, claiming they never got the item in the mail. Then PayPal asks you to verify shipping off a product that you never shipped off because you met in person. Now, you have to refund the money and postage fee that the buyer never paid.
Selling what’s not yours
In this scam, the product is actually being sold, but it’s not being sold by the person you bought it from. So when the seller gets you to pay for the valuable item—like a car—outside of eBay, you don’t think anything of it until you go meet the seller. The seller doesn’t know you because the listing the seller has is either another eBay listing or a listing on some other site. The person you bought the product from was not the real seller-only someone duplicating an actual product for sell. And since you paid outside eBay, you can’t get your money back.
References: http://www.welivesecurity.com/2015/02/09/common-ebay-scams-avoid/
