Catching Up With eBay Scammers
from the seems-like-another-one-everyday dept
It seems like the oldest scam in the eBay book... put up an item for auction, take the money, don't send the item (whether or not you actually have it). Clearly, it's still very popular. Earlier this week there was the story of the 13-year-old who became so successful at eBay scamming that he had to hire a staff. Today, there are two different stories from different parts of the globe about people being caught doing the same thing. One guy in California apparently defrauded people out of nearly $100,000 by selling non-existent sports tickets and watches. In the case of the sports tickets, he sometimes would send blank pieces of paper. Over in Austria someone claimed to sell clothes over the internet (though, the story doesn't say if it was eBay specifically, or somewhere else), and scammed people out of nearly 60,000 euros before people began to notice they weren't actually getting the clothes. Since these scams are so common, it appears they're still fairly easy to get away with -- which suggests people aren't making use of things like escrow services or other methods to ensure the item exists. Still, this seems like the type of scam where you're definitely going to get caught sooner or later. How hard is it to follow the money trail?
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Escrow
I would guess most people getting scammed are newbs at eBay. eBay could probably do a great service by making sure more people get educated. But then the tards would just skip over the education and get scammed either way.
They're probably the same idiots buying stickers for $300 to magically give their cars better gas mileage.
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