HOW NOT TO GET SCAMMED BY DODGY BUYERS, I DIDNT!

Hi everyone,

This is my first review here on ebay although ive been trading for a long time. I had a recent bad experience here on ebay which lost me £260 for a nokia 8800 that i was selling and also the buyer had made a paypal reversal.

Im sure this has happened to many people right? Well heres my story...........

I sold a nokia 8800 to a ebay member, the member made a instant payment, i was away for 2 days and when i got back i checked my account and i had several messages from this member saying things like "reply to me asap, if you do not reply i will leave negative feedback as i havent recieved the phone" ok fair enough i understood the frustration of this buyer as i would feel the same way after sending £260 to someone, i then immediately reply once i got back and apolagised although i had a 3 day handling time, so i was not in the wrong.

I had notified the buyer that i was going to get the phone out to them asap and will email them a tracking number. I then posted out the item on the same day and later on that evening i recieved an email from paypal saying that they have placed a temporary hold on the funds recieved as the may be unauthorised. At this point i was furious i couldnt believe that i may have lost the phone and the money may be reversed. So this is what i done:

Tried to get in touch with royal mail to stop the parcel from being deliviered - but at this point all the offices were closed,.

I then decided that i will call them again the next morning as soon as their offices open at 8:30am to try and stop the parcel from being delivered. I then tried this the next morning and got through to a rep and was told that "its actually illegal to intercept a parcel" at this point i just gave up and accepted my loss. Later on the same day i decided to check on the royal mail website if the parcel had been delivered using the tracking number. To my amazement the had left a while you were out card!

I was delighted thinking nows my opportunity, so i quickly phoned royal mail again and they notified me that the parcel is still in their sorting office, i told them the situation and asked if they could send it back to the sender(me) the lady on the phone put through a special request and did tell me that initially the parcel could stay at the office for up to 3 weeks and the person could come and pick it up. But thankfully i recieved the parcel the next day and i was very happy. Paypal did reverse the money so i was glad that i recieved back my item.

The same thing happened to a friend of mine where he lost car audio equipment in the same way as someone hacked into a buyers account and he lost out on hundreds of pound and was devastated, i learn from his mistake and acted fast. But i was lucky as paypal notified me within a few days but he was notified after a few weeks.


These people are hacking into ebayers accounts using spoof emails,

So how can you protect yourself from spoofs?

From my experience i have experienced many spoofs:

If you recieve an email do not click on any LINKS to go to a website, always open a new window and type in the whole web address url yourself. If you log into a dodgy link that looks like an ebay site but isnt then the hackers will gain access to your password and take control and buy and sell items to make money.

I also once recieved a link to a fake paypal website, it was definetly a good copy, but me being a bit of a IT whiz checked it out and could tell something was wrong, firstly on the original homepage there is a white lady on a phone, on the fake one it had a black person smiling, also the paypal logo was different - trademark missing, its a case of SPOT OF DIFFERENCE.

So always open a new browser and manually type the web site address - and try to deal with CONFIRMED/VERIFIED ebayers when selling or buying items of a larger value.

Thats one way of HOW NOT TO GET SCAMMED BY DODGY BUYERS ON EBAY!

I hope this guide will help some people, this is just the way i dealt with this problem, i was lucky as i acted fast. Thanks for lookin!