Update on the eBay Scam
kevquirk.com46 points by speckx 2 days ago
46 points by speckx 2 days ago
Few years ago. A buyer cheated me on eBay. Basically, they purchased my mac and asked me to ship it to their son's address. They paid money through Paypal & cancelled the transaction after I shipped it. eBay didn't help/pay me because I didn't ship it to buyer's registered address. There is no accountability on eBay end. I lost $1.5K laptop. An expensive learning. Since then, I don't use eBay.
I shipped with signature verification to the buyers address. The buyer claimed they didn't receive the item and eBay still sided with them and refunded their money. I will never sell anything on eBay again.
Something similar happened to a friend who sold a camera on eBay.
They took eBay to small claims court and won easily. eBay paid them out (and then banned them but they had already stopped using eBay by then).
I keep getting packages in the mail that are addressed to me, but not things I ordered. Lawnmower parts, plumbing hardware, a grill cover, a magnetron (!), etc.
One had an amazon slip in it, but most of them have come through ebay. I reported the one to amazon and the rest to ebay (I gave them the USPS tracking numbers since I didn't know the order numbers), and also contacted a couple of the sellers who were businesses with public contact info. The sellers I reached both said they would send me return labels, but neither has yet.
I feel like this has to be a scam, but I'm not sure exactly what the scam is. Maybe someone's writing fake reviews, but making real orders to match?
On ebay people will create fake purchases in order to get a 100% rating and then scam people since people are being far more judicial about who they're buying from.
Just a recent example I had.
I was looking for a new camera. Finally settled in on a Fuji X-T3. The prices on legit camera places like B&H, Andorama and MPB were running around $800 for an excellent condition body. It went down from there in price. Found a body on ebay for $790. Right price, albeit a bit less and for a silver body. There has been an increase in demand for the silver body since Fuji announced they will no longer make them. Most silver bodies have been pushed up over $800 for even a decent condition body.
After kind of going back and forth over whether I wanted to make the purchase, the seller messaged me with an offer of $750. I was leaning on purchasing, but just as an experiment, I sent Claude the link to the auction and asked if it saw any red flags.
Claude pointed out it was a fairly new account within the last few months. Yes, it had 100% seller rating, but they only had six sales with zero user feedback. They also were not accepting returns. For a $700+ purchase, this was too many red flags and I ended up getting something off of MPB instead.
I believe this is the scam. Set up two accounts. Sell one account to another account with a fake user and address. In this case, your address. Ship useless stuff to fake account, boost your rating in order to ease people's anxiety over ordering from someone with less than 100% seller rating. If the person getting the useless junk emails you, say you'll send a return label, then never do it.
As a "photography is a cheaper hobby than a boat person" I am semi-shocked you even considered it for only about 6ish percent off...
Even Amazon sellers where there is a better return policy will happily try to pass nonfunctional stuff as working and hope nobody notices till after the return period.
(And that, actually happened on a 500$ used a6000. Looked like it worked gr8 till you tried to take a picture)
Many sellers will cut whatever corners they can to get a lower price point, as that's what purchasers look for. The one that stands out to me is shipping, sure go for for cheap shipping on a trivial cost item, but I question doing the same when you're buying something expensive and not consider spending some proportion of the price on a better courier/service tier to have more certainty the item will get to you and in good condition, assuming the seller doesn't bake-in the cost of upgraded courier.
That does sound like brushing, https://www.uspis.gov/news/scam-article/brushing-scam, which is effectively what you describe: >Maybe someone's writing fake reviews, but making real orders to match
Man, that seems wasteful.
I opened all of the packages already, so it's too late to send them back. (I get enough things in the mail that I did order, that I pretty much have to open it to know it's something I didn't order.)
I hadn’t heard of brushing, but you might also be a bystander for a different common eBay scam. Seller sells to Buyer, but ships something different to another address with the same zip code. I think eBay may have since fixed part of this, but the deal was that all the tracking info would show that the seller shipped and delivered something of the right approximate weight to the buyer (because USPS would only share/confirm info accurate to zip code level).
The thing that makes it less likely is that the buyer and seller had multiple transactions together which is uncommon for eBay. And also if the stuff you got was expensive. Maybe buyer really just put the wrong address and neither side can do much to get the item back once delivered?
I got hit with that exact scam recently as a buyer, and I can tell you eBay has not figured out how to mitigate it yet. I purchased an expensive item from the seller. He sent some token thing to a different address in my city in the same zip code and provided me (and eBay) the tracking info. Item was delivered, and all eBay knows is "item sent to zip code X was delivered" so it was marked as delivered. I submitted a dispute, which was pretty much instantly closed with "Seller provided proof of delivery." I contacted UPS who happily provided me the actual address the package was delivered to. I escalated through eBay's support channel and offered to prove that the delivery was not to my address but they didn't care or want to know the actual delivery address. Finally, after a few days, eBay got back to me with a form letter saying I would be refunded because the seller's item was "lost in the mail," which was total bullshit, but at this point I didn't care since I got my money back, but the scammer probably kept the money too, so I guess eBay is eating these costs.
I got scammed once where the seller didn't even ship anything, but just came up with a tracking number for my zip code that had already been delivered recently. Took weeks of back-and-forth with customer service to get a refund. They had listed the item in a category that doesn't have the money-back guarantee (which I had no idea was a thing)
>I feel like this has to be a scam, but I'm not sure exactly what the scam is
This is called a brushing scam.
Man, I'd like to get a magnetron for free.
Send me a shipping label. (I'm only half-joking. I told the original seller I'd send it back to them, so I feel like I ought to give them at least a week or two to get me the label they said they'd send. But, seriously, email me in a month, and if I still haven't heard back from the seller, I'll send it to you.)
Out of curiosity, based on a comment I read on HN the other day, I fed your profile notes into Claude and asked it to tell me your email address. It had no problem. I guess the days of obfuscating email addresses that way to foil scrapers is behind us.
Yeah, but it takes a heck of a lot more compute to to run an llm than a regex. So I think there's still some value in obfuscation.
That is a fair observation, especially since my default Claude model is Opus 4.6, which is about as far away from efficient as you can get. I don't have any recent models downloaded on my MBP, but maybe this evening I'll try it again and see how that goes -- especially the smaller lightweight models.
Just finished dealing with a eBay scam myself. Bought a used laptop, it got marked as shipped but the tracking number was fake and not real. Due to it being marked as shipped I had to wait 28 days for eBay purchase protection to do something about it as the seller was ignoring messages & making excuses. eBay protection refunded the purchase in less than an hour after opening the request. Did some searching online and learned there are quite a few scams running on eBay.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/11/how-carders-can-use-ebay...
This site features one of the worst fonts I’ve ever seen.
I thought so, too - dangerously close to Comic Sans, but for the block-quote, they throw in a cursive lowercase L. Just the one letter in cursive. I assume font nerds are going "ooh, it's so subtle, so elegant!"
Oh! I recognize that font from the recent thread on fonts! It's called Maple Mono[0], and yeah the connected cursive italic lowercase l is weird. But it's also implemented/designed poorly[1], and there's a chance it only looks awful because of that (lol). But IDK because there's no example of it being done well to compare against. It certainly would look less weird if they just didn't try to connect them to preceding letters. Anyway, someone was gushing about it, and that struck me as very odd specifically because of how bad the lowercase italic l is, but you can disable that feature if you want. So maybe that's the version they were using.
The cursive l I actually like. We learn to write that here at elementary school (at around the age of six). So if quoting, a handwritten font is nice. I use such in my nvim config as well. But AFAIK such a font is proprietary. Now, this fella's repo owner is CN, so I doubt they learned such at elementary school. It is also, like you said, weird since it stands out. If the rest also used cursive handwriting letters it would've been fine. So yeah, classic case of cha bu duo, or a quick personal hack you'd be embarrassed to share).
I used to work with a guy who configured his IDE to use some wacky all-cursive font and it was awful. Not just having to read code in cursive, but also ligatures for things like "=>". So with every bit of code I had to constantly figure out what the real characters were underneath all that crap on the screen.
> “We message back and forth on WhatsApp…”
Why would you message the buyer outside of eBay? That’s a recipe for having eBay flag you as a scammer.
This is the reason I stopped selling on eBay. Zero protection for the seller.
eBay's buyer protections are eroding as well.
I bought a phone on eBay last month. The seller insured it with USPS. When the phone arrived with a cracked screen (the listing had photos of a not-cracked screen) I photographed the damage and submitted a return request with eBay. The seller then filed an insurance claim with USPS.
USPS sent me a letter, requiring me to present the damaged package (and its contents) to my local postmaster. I documented this to the seller via eBay, but complied with the government authority -- I didn't want the seller to lose his insurance claim because I didn't comply. The postmaster kept the package, saying it was a requirement.
Once the phone was out of my hands, the seller denied the return, keeping my money, while presumably keeping the money from the USPS insurance claim.
I have no recourse with eBay.
I've come to the conclusion that anything under about $500 isn't worth trying to sell online anymore. eBay has eroded as a marketplace for sellers.
For anything higher value, I have hobbyist forums I have 20 year memberships on where I can spend the time to due diligence individual buyers and transactions thoroughly. Even here I often don't get maximum dollars as I may have 3 offers and go with the person I am most comfortable transacting with.
And even on the higher end, it's easier to just do a trade in at a retailer instead of trying to extract maximum value doing business online.
On the lower end the problem is it's not worth the time to do the due diligence, and there are a tremendous number of time wasting tire kickers for lower value items. So I end up giving stuff away or just holding on to it, which is a shame.
> anything under about $500 isn't worth trying to sell online anymore
Anything under say $100 I'm fine selling on ebay because a) it's less likely to be scammed and b) even if it is, I don't care that much. Anything over that amount is only being sold in person on fb marketplace. Or, like you said, on a hobbyist forum.
I agree that ebay has completely eroded for sellers. It's basically a ship and be pleasantly surprised later situation.
I’ve gotten comfortable with selling things very cheap on Craigslist.
E.g. a $300 recliner I’d sell for $25 because no one will give you hassle about it, and at that price, you can pick from several buyers the one that is least likely to be a headache.
As an ethical buyer, it's incredible... but I'll be damned if I ever take the risk of selling anything on eBay.
ebay seems to scam buyers too.
I was looking for a phone. Lots of sellers will list things as brand new which should imply new in box (unopened packaging). After you carefully read the listing, they actually mean open box which is far more variable.
Ebay does not care at all. It makes the search basically useless.
Not the only scam on eBay these days - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47566523
The scammer is doing so much effort for like... £85?
Seller protections on eBay are effectively non-existent. I’ve sold $50,000+ of stuff on the site and their compulsory Money Back Guarantee that they make on your behalf will make your blood boil when you get bullshit INAD shakedowns because the buyer didn’t feel like reading or didn’t know how properly use the item. Even if you have written communication from the buyer sent on eBay outright saying they’re abusing the system, eBay doesn’t care. Normally it wouldn’t be a big deal, but the extra 7% FVF they take on top of their base 13.5% is offensive.
At this point I just lie and cheat the system as much as I can. I’ve had a significantly better experience since I started carefully massaging every metric, threatening INAD abusers with mail fraud reports, coaching buyers through returns to keep my metrics up, etc. I always have and always will do right by honest customers, but I’m done just grabbing my ankles when it comes to dealing with eBay and their policies.
Got sold obviously counterfeit goods on eBay. eBay denied a refund despite me having clear photo evidence. Had to do a chargeback via the card. Will probably lose my 28 year old eBay account over this.
I’m convinced the platforms are more than aware of the wide range of frauds and simply don’t care; they are complicit.
eBay doesn’t give a shit they hire Ivy League and h1b, when they could hire people that actually use the site, but that’s not how companies think. I seemed to know more about eBay than the support team did the few times I have called them