Selling your DJ stuff on eBay – a cautionary tale

A rather clever eBay scammer has relieved me and some others out of rather expensive items. Here's what happened and how you can guard against it.

Having just cleansed the Worxlab of extraneous DJ gubbins, my bank account looked a little healthier, just in time for the end of July tax bill. That was until this morning, when a Paypal dispute had been raised against a mixer. The rest of my morning has ended up in the toilet, and it’s a cautionary tale that I wish to share with you all.

Seller beware

You know how it goes — you put something on eBay and hope for the best. The buyer contacted me saying he was having issues getting the payment to go through, so he’d organise a different way. A short time later, payment arrived and a delivery address. So I despatched the mixer, transferred the payment to my bank account, and moved on.

So this morning’s Paypal dispute comes as a surprise. After a morning of digging, it appears that myself and a few others have been the victim of a clever scammer. This scammer had 70+ eBay reputation points, which gave me a good feeling about dealing with him, and was obviously the first part of the con. The good communication and quick payment obviously helped too.

Here’s the con — the payment comes from someone else, and while it appears to link to the original item, it actually links to a non-existent item called “2 channel DJ Mixer”, which when casually glanced, makes you think it’s entirely legit as you’re more likely to be looking at the amount.

THE CHAIN IS BROKEN

This is where eBay and PayPal will wash their hands of the whole thing. Unless the payment follows the item, they’re not interested. And Paypal will only pay attention if the delivery address is the same as the payers. See – it’s clever.

It would appear that I’ve been conned out of expensive product, and the person that paid was probably expecting it to be delivered to them, but it was sent to somewhere else. It hasn’t escaped me that the payer may be in on the scam too.

Summing up

If you regularly eBay stuff, be very careful:

  • A history of good feedback matters, but it’s always worth checking in detail.
  • Your spider sense should start tingling when they talk of eBay payment problems.
  • If a payment arrives, be absolutely sure that it directly ties up to the original item, and that the payer’s address matches the delivery address.

I’m now left with a report to submit to Action Fraud, which is luckily backed up with two case numbers from other victims.

HAVE YOU BEEN SCAMMED?

I had a Nigerian scammer try it on once, but luckily I saw that coming from a distance. So I’m interested to hear about your online selling experiences. Have you been relieved of lumps of shiny without financial recompense? Or has it generally been good for you?

Mark Settle
Mark Settle

The old Editor of DJWORX - you can now find Mark at WORXLAB

Articles: 1228

21 Comments

  1. One additional thought on this…

    eBay offers direct access to shipping resources within their site to ship any items you’ve sold. You’re not obligated to use them; assuming you use a service with traceable shipments you’re within their seller’s requirements, but I’d recommend purchasing/managing any shipping through eBay itself. Keywords here being “traceable shipments”. Obviously, you *never* want to ship anything you’ve sold with any kind of tracking number.

    I mention this only because I’ve had 3 or 4 instances in the past year where buyers have come back after the item was paid for and shipped to their confirmed addresses saying that they’d never received the items in question.

    In each instance, I simply pulled up the tracking information through eBay itself to see confirmed deliveries each time. Because I had purchased the shipping through eBay the folks at the site were able to easily verify this themselves which quickly shifts the responsibility of such claims back on the buyer.

    I can’t say the buyers in question were trying to pull some sort of scam but someone saying they haven’t received an item shipped when you have a confirmed delivery to a verified address should definitely raise a red flag to you as a seller.

    • In this instance I have the eBay message telling me which address to send it to, and the singed for confirmation from the courier. The problem is the disconnection between the item and the payment. All I can hope is that with a few of us being conned, our weight of evidence and delivery addresses being on the same London street but different numbers will help us.

      • I should think so. Most likely you’ll have to call and speak with someone at eBay to have this sorted (if you haven’t already). I’ve had to do it myself several times just to push the process along but they were very helpful each time.

  2. I’ve sold numerous valuable items on eBay. I can’t say this will 100% protect sellers since eBay has a nasty habit of protecting buyers no matter what (hence why it’s easier to scam on eBay in the first place), but no matter what you sell, REQUIRE A SIGNATURE when you ship the item. That way if they claim they never received the item, you can always say “Someone signed for it, so you indeed received the item”. Matter of fact, if there’s no one there to receive the item, they won’t deliver it and the person has to wait ’til the next day to receive the item. aka, something that is their problem, not yours.

    Now if they’re finding away to scam around THAT, then holy shit they have stepped up their game.

    • You have not sold that much on Ebay if you have not encountered scams other than “item not received” LOL. Stepped their game up? More like an entirely new game…………..

  3. Sorry to hear that.
    I always insist on paypal payment and delivery to the address I get from paypal.

    Once, somebody tried to fuck me over, but paypal helped very quickly.

  4. I’ve had the exact same thing happen with a laptop.
    I was transferred the money and had moved it to my bank account when I met the person and physically handed them the laptop.
    Seemed pretty simple until I got a PayPal message from someone I’d never heard of days later about”my friend” being unresponsive now and not delivering (they also thought they were buying something totally different)

    I’ve also seen eBay seller ratings be total junk. I’ve found companies that have 1000+ positive feedback and took that as a good sign.
    Until you look closer and realise they’ve just purchased thousands of 1c items (probably from another account they control) over a couple of days to get that feedback before they start listing high value items.

  5. Sold a Urei 1620LE once. Buyer said it arrived perfectly and even issue 100% positive (aka no complaints whatsoever) feedback. A week later opened an Ebay dispute saying the face was terribly bent in shipping……………. as if this is something that can be missed upon first glance?!?!? Ebay told me the buyer was a scammer and don’t worry about it which I still to this day have the phone call recorded as proof. They (ebay) are still looking to get money ($1600) from me for the mixer to this day while buyer still has it. They (Ebay) can go f*ck themselves as far as I am concerned. This is not the first time they did this and IMO they are facilitating fraud with how far they get involved. As a general rule now I maintain the stance of Ebay is a buyers world ONLY. If anyone challenges this give me your Ebay user ID and I guarantee I can ruin you in one transaction………….. Best part is I will have to do minimal work as Ebay will do most of it for me :) As this article says sell at your ow risk with Ebay they have gotten to big for their own good.

    • Totally agreed, Dave. I don’t sell stuff on eBay to have that experience but I have heard a lot of cases where eBay is the buyers world and yes, eBay allow fraudulent activities to happen while they do nothing to crack down on it. In the Latin records world, a seller can have multiple accounts bidding on their own auction to inflate the price. I only buy from trusted people.

  6. Ebay become crap some time (years) ago. I purchase things that never arrived or have extra fee at dull.
    With Dealextreme first, Amazon and Alibaba later or apps like wallapop (P2P spanish app for secondhand around you) why to use ebay?

    • Hey Dubby, I have used all the others, but have only heard of Dealextreme in passing? What’s been your experience? Is this a ship from China thing? Any disputes/issues?

      RD

      • Slow as fuck (over a month from China to Spain) and Amazon like in the no-sense of recieve cheap things in different packages without shipping costs. I only bought small things (some of them pcb boards and so) but these arrived well without issues or dull taxes. A little hint is ask sellers to send things as gift or free samples.

  7. I strictly use Paypal. They are not the issue as Mark pointed out. It only becomes a problem when the person tries to pay you outside of the eBay-Paypal chain. They have no recourse if this occurs. Someone tried to do this with me and it immediately smelled fishy so I informed eBay immediately and they ended up banning this person from eBay. I also received my item and went on happy as punch.

  8. It had been good to me, while handling a few rules.

    -if it seems to good to be true, it probably is.
    -always meet in person, so you or the person you are selling to can test the equipment.
    -cash. Always. That brings the risk of false notes but you can test the notes for yourself.

  9. This same thing happend to me. But I got all my money back. All you have to do is prove that they asked you to change the primary billing address through an eBay message. Therefore you are within PayPals sellers rights. Just be nice &. Courteous &. Several transfer calls later you will get your money back. Took like a month though… But if they asked you to change the primary email by a personal email then you’re screwed. Only eBay messages Is protected under the PayPals sellers protection.

    I sold an i5 processor for $200+ and the buyer tried to say they never received it. Well I proved that they asked me to change the shipping address. So I did. And they refunded me.

  10. I used to sell a bunch on ebay and actually stopped using my original account because I ran into a run of buyers with the “not as described” scam (conditions were well documented and accurate) who would threaten to open a dispute and leave bad feedback unless I refunded them a bunch of money. Sadly, I went along with it a couple times but then I had a repeat buyer try to do the same thing. I have to say in those days bad feedback was a killer, maybe not so much anymore IDK. That whole experience basically put an end to my desire to run an eBay business.

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