Is an ebay virgin being had?

but look at the number in parenthese next to his name,,,it'll give you an idea of his reputation..clicking on it will give you what he's sold and opinions of people who have purchased from him...if he's always been selling bootlegs, maybe he does do that legitimatly

Bah.

As long as your username isn't your address, I don't think anyone can find out your address (except possibly the seller, but only when the auction is over). Was it a proper email or was it sent through the ebay form? Anyway, don't trust the bootleg, at all. Buying shrinkwrappeed, boxed software is probably OK though.

It arrived as a perfectly normal email, from the guy's direct address (no mention of ebay in the header). Should this not be possible? No, my ebay username does not include my email address.

so my mate has just been goosed by an ebay seller. She was trying to buy a digital camera and after sending the £200 off nothing has arrived. Lots of emails later and the guy has deleted himself from ebay now.

Where does my mate stand on this? What's her next move?

Should I ignore this? Report it to eBay fraud? Try to contact the seller?

-- Beauty and the Beastliness (masonicboo...), January 13th, 2006 11:00 AM. (kate) (later)

This is a "phishing" email, just ignore it. I get emails like this supposedly from Chase Bank, Barclays, some Italian bank, plus tons of Ebay and Paypal ones. It's usually pretty obvious they're fake, you'd think the scammers would make a bit more effort.

However, I can't respond to it, as every time I try to, it asks for a username and password - and I don't even have an account!

Where does my mate stand on this? What's her next move?

Contact ebay and the police. Depends on your police authority of course, some are more proactive in dealing with it.

This one looks remarkably not fake - it has eBay logos on it, and links to various pages about what to do if eBay is being spoofed.

Exactly, that's why so many people get conned.

back to my question, i think my mate was a silly silly girl and opted to contact the guy directly to make an 'offer' instead of bidding (yes I know, very silly). Obv this will void any ebay insurance or involvement, I'd say she's fucked really and perhaps learnt an online buying lesson the hard way.

At first I thought it was my mum sending me ridiculous links to carpets again.

Email addresses can be spoofed.

(also, the 'from' email address means nothing. as you're not replying to the email but using the link within it it doesn't matter that the email address goes back to the proper ebay. any urls within the email will also probably look ok too but will be redirects to their site.)

I clicked that link, gave it a fake user/password, it then linked to the legit page it was spoofing, with a 'no such password' type error.

So, that spoof page basically is a portal to link into the genuine ebay, so if you had entered a true user/password, it would have deposited you into ebay for real and you would never have known.

Best one I ever saw linked to a website that somehow (I don't know HTML at all) managed to remove the address bar from IE and replace it with a .jpg of an address bar saying ebay.com so you'd think you were on a real ebay website. You could tell it was just a picture because you couldn't make the drop down menu work, but still, quite impressive.

er, unless you were using anything other than IE on a PC, of course :)

So, that spoof page basically is a portal to link into the genuine ebay, so if you had entered a true user/password, it would have deposited you into ebay for real and you would never have known.

i'm a wee bit confused here. if it drops you into the "genuine" eBay, rather than getting you to type your credit-card and mortgage details etc into a fake site (which is how i've always assumed these things work), surely that mean the actual "fraud" is being perpetrated within eBay, and that eBay therefore would have some responsibility to repay you when you lost everything you owned and were sold into slavery?

or am i missing something?

Well, if it's that professional it can probably tell what browser you're using and alter the pic accordingly?

ah, i see. that makes sense. thank you. i always assumed you were just sent to a page with a badly drawn eBay logo that said: "HELO WEER EBAY PLEESE TEL US YOUR BANK DETAILS THANK YUO."

Well, if it's that professional it can probably tell what browser you're using and alter the pic accordingly?

if they've bothered to do one for firefox on the mac, i'll eat my hat.

-- Beauty and the Beastliness (masonicboo...) (webmail), Today 5:00 AM. (kate) (later)

Ive been having a bitch of a time with ebay lately too. I got a letter from the last week saying they had suspended my account because i broke ebay site policy: 'users cannot trade on ebay if they have a suspended account'.

basically, they think im someone else whose account was suspended and then created a new account (which they think is mine). immediately following this email i got another saying that my auction listing was ended early because id been suspended. i didnt even have an auction listing. i havent sold anything on ebay for well over a year.

anyway i wrote them an email with all this info and they wrote back saying they would start an appeal if i filled out a form acknowledging that I had done what they accused me of and that I write that i will never do it again. WTF??

anyways, ebay is going all screwy lately.

Anybody had any success using the paypal resolution centre?

I bought a laptop for what I thought was the bargain price of £155, 3 weeks ago. Needless to say it hasn't turned up and the seller hasn't answered any of emails in more than a week, initially claiming it was delayed by a postal strike. So I escalated it to a claim through the paypal resolution centre today, but I'm not optimistic about getting my money back.

I'd be optimistic. This is entirely standardised.

I thought this thread was going to be about someone's auction of their actual virgnity.

I bought a midi keyboard which didn't turn up (suspiciously, after I placed my bid the seller started a new buy-it-now auction for the same model of keyboard, which ended almost immediately) and the Paypal resolution centre thing got me my money back, but that was because he didn't respond to any of their or my emails. If the seller doesn't answer then it automatically goes in the buyer's favour.

Fingers crossed for you - I have done OK on ebay and not been screwed over on anything big, but when things go wrong I do worry a bit about how little it seems you can do about it (risk my 100% low-30s feedback to make not even a dent in their 98% 10000 feedback? move our email battles of "no really, it was lost in the post, but you can't have the tracking number even though I recommended you pay extra for recorded delivery" to the resolution centre, except what if it really was lost in the post?).

But as Mark says this kind of thing is exactly what the resolution centre is for and hopefully it'll work out for you.

at least you paid by paypal :(

i did a bank transfer (a projector that never will arrive for £200) and i don't think ebay are being helpful AT ALL. will have to call the police this weekend.

like, i waited 10 days after i reported the problem with the dispute report (which was already 1.5 week after i paid and then not received the goods and seller discommunicated me) so i can say "i feel i have no option but to report this to the ebay blahblah team". then all it seems to have done was to change the dispute status to "closed".

like, not even any feedback as to what you're stupposed to do.

You'll get your money back. Paypal is very good on the buyer's side - but rather terrible for legit sellers.

I won't sell anything expensive with Paypal anymore, there's too big a chance of a crook being on the other side and me getting screwed.

not a louis jagger thread?

They do always warn you against paying by bank transfer. I've done it but only for small amounts of money.
A friend of mine had someone hack into his gmail (he'd somehow downloaded some kind of spyware that probably 'reads' you passwords) - unfortunately he had just sent off a job application to somewhere that needed all kind of security checks - so it had his mother's maiden name on and all sorts of stuff. The baddies then set up an Ebay account with his details and began selling non-existent laptops. First he knew about it was irate buyers ringing him up and demanding their laptops (yes, they even put his real mobile no. on the account, lolz).

Police can't really do anything for him as he's not really lost anything apart from his good ebay reputation. The buyers had sent money by bank transfer to some Spanish bank account.

Guess what, the laptop arrived today only a day after filing a claim via paypal. Still not happy as the wanker who sold it hasn't put the power adapter in with it, even though it was advertised with it. Will keep the claim running for a bit longer.

Glad I kept my claim going as the fella who sold it is a total spanner.

Eventually received the charger last Thursday, which in fairness was probably delayed by postal strike. Power up the lappy and it's missing drivers for the soundcard and the wireless, download and install them, seems ok. Half an hour later there's about 7 beeps and it shuts down. Powers up ok and play with it again installing zonealarm, firefox, seems ok but then shuts down after an hour, this time won't boot up at all. Try several times before realising I've been sold a lemon.

I email the guy, saying I want my money back and that he had a 7 day returns if unhappy with it, replies by telling me to get stuffed, it was working ok when he mailed it and I must have fucked it up. As I wasn't getting anywhere, I escalated my paypal dispute to a claim. Today I get an email from ebay, saying that the seller hasn't received payment and is filing a dispute, despite the fact that I paid the guy via paypal. Keeping my powder dry at the moment am tempted to email the guy and tell him to fuck himself.