Monday 6 June 2011

Do not buy from Asian Ebay scammers

Maybe most of you have an ebay account and have bought once or twice from this largest auction site. Some of you may have a good experience and some of you may have a bad experience buying items from Ebay.

2 weeks ago I have won bidding an unlocked new iPhone 4 for just US320, it is really cheap compare to same item sold at offline store. A day later the seller send me an invoice. Ask me to pay as soon as possible because he has a lot of orders and the stock was running out, If I do not pay in two days he said that I need to wait for other incoming stocks. So I pay him on the spot. He do no use paypal but other merchant payment service. So I pay him using my debit mastercards, payment success and one week after that, I received the iPhone.

But oh my god, he sent me a fake iPhone, it looks real and do not look fake at all, the iPhone using both wm6.5 and android 2.2, as far as i know iPhone do not use android. So I sent an email to him ask for his explaination. Unfortunately until today he do not answer my email. I have report this case to Ebay but they can do nothing. The only thing they can do is ban the seller and their ip. But everyone knows that the scammer can easily open new seller account and start selling fake items back on Ebay. Not just cell phones, there were many fake items like basket ball jerseys, 'somebody's' autograph, copyright software and etc.

From what I know there was a technique they use to scam people on Ebay, they called it stealth or blackhat. Most fake items on Ebay was mailed from China dropshipper and it was not easy to identify the scammer identity because they use US postal address to verify their seller account.