| eBay Scams |
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| Written by Travis Morien | |
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eBay is an excellent site I have often dealt with, buying stuff at great prices and selling stuff I no longer need. Paypal offer a reasonable level of buyer protection, but there is still plenty of scope to get ripped off and at times getting your money back is hard. For example, there is a very common scam on eBay to sell Chinese made USB flash drives and MP3/MP4 players with much smaller capacities than advertised. For example, you might buy a 64G flash drive or MP3 player and find that only 4G is usable. Your computer thinks it is a 64G drive, but when you try copying more than 4G onto it, you find that files are simply being scrambled. If you contact the vendor they will invariably pretend to be surprised and sorry for the inconvenience caused, and ask you to mail it back to them for an exchange. Do not do this, they may simply not acknowledge receipt, and then you'll lose your money and your item. In this case, what is usually happening is the person has sold you a 4G flash drive or MP3 player with a hacked ROM that fools your computer into seeing the device as 64G, but in reality it only has 4G of memory in it and while your computer will try to copy files to it, the files will not actually be written to it. (Rather unfortunate of course if you are moving instead of copying the files, as the originals will be deleted). This is an extremely common scam that has been going on for years with eBay flash drives and MP3 players, particularly those originating in China and Hong Kong. Despite the fact that the devices are frauds, you'll note that the vendors of these have very high feedback ratings. They manage that because typically a person will not discover the limit until after they rate the transaction. What most people do is copy a single song onto it, have a listen, and then rate the transaction. As eBay only allow you to rate a transaction once, there is no possibility of going back later that day to change your rating. And so, the vendor gets overwhelmingly positive ratings. There are a few tricks to protect yourself. First, always check for negative ratings. While 1,000 people might have given the person a good rating, one in a thousand might have waited until after they found the faults before rating it. If you see just one person making the comment "a blatant scam, this is a 4G drive with a hacked chip" then you can assume that the other thousand people all got the same thing, but discovered too late. Second, make sure you pay via Paypal and credit card. You'll then have two layers of protection, people to complain to (for what its worth) should the transaction go sour. Third, wait until you've put the device through its proper paces for a couple of weeks before rating, and don't hesitate to give a negative rating if you have been ripped off. Not only will it protect others, but it will also give you more leverage when negotiating a refund. It's up to your own sense of ethics whether you're comfortable with having your silence bought or not, but do not underestimate the willingness of a scammer to pay you a full refund in order to make that negative rating go away. Of course, you should wait until the money has actually hit your account before you withdraw your negative rating! Fourth, do not hesitate to complain to eBay and Paypal via the mechanisms provided, and demand a full refund. There are many other articles about eBay scams, which you'll find by searching for that term. The key point I wished to make here was to point out that 99.9% positive feedback doesn't necessarily mean the vendor is legit. He might simply be selling stuff which takes a day or two for the fault to be discovered, and buying the silence of those who gave negative ratings by refunding them on condition that the rating gets withdrawn. |
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