Lots of people, like myself, have become newly registered with ebay in order to try and get tickets for this winter's Ashes tour, seeing as Cricket Australia messed up their allocation policy.

Many new users may not be aware of some of the ways rip-off merchants operate on the internet, so this is a warning to you if you receive an email offering a Second Chance sale.

I have been outbid on a couple of sales and soon afterwards received an email from someone claiming to be the seller, who said the winning bidder had failed to pay and so I was offered the chance to buy the tickets at my final bid price.  I was asked to contact the 'seller' direct and not through eBay.

Naturally, I smelt a rat and this was confirmed throughout the day when I received TWENTY emails from different people all claiming the same thing. A quick check of their IDs revealed brand new users based in Singapore, Honduras, Phillipines, USA...

So, NEVER contact anyone who claims to have the item you want if ask you to email them directly. You could lose a lot of cash.

And report them to eBay.