Selling Scams
I contacted a seller about a rare figurine. Soon after I did some research on the item and discovered the ad on another site at a significant discount. I tried to contact the seller again providing the offending site address. I had this happen to me and immediately changed my password and the offending site was no longer available. I am not sure if EBAY would catch this scam if someone tried to purchase or if it would affect my business.
8 comments
mam98031
·10 months ago@jdbelt1960
The seller likely took your well meaning message as an attempt to scam them or get them to cut their pricing. So rather than engage you, they were hoping if the ignored your message you'd just go away.
Sellers get emails like that from buyers that are honest like you AND some without good intentions towards the seller. So I hope you will understand, they likely thought you were fishing for a discount.
kensgiftshop
·10 months agoThe other site is a scam site and has nothing to do with Ebay.
Those sites are usually set up to collect buyers payment information.
jdbelt1960
OP10 months agoTotally agree. I am not blaming EBAY. Just know there are scammers out there and the easiest way to protect yourself is regularly changing your password. Nobody always does it because of the hassle remembering a new password but it is important. You may have hundreds or thousands of dollars of merchandise at risk.
jonathanbrightlight
·10 months ago@jdbelt1960 Your password has nothing to do with a listing being copied on a foreign site. They are only using public information from your listing.
Edit: and your merchandise is not at risk. Only the person attempting to buy from the scammer is at risk.
jdbelt1960
OP10 months agoWell as a fact I changed my password and went back to the offending site and it was not available. These people can grab passwords and copy sites. You do not have to take my simple IT Security info.
jonathanbrightlight
·10 months agoThat’s not how it works… none of those foreign scammers are accessing your account, nor do they need to.
a_c_green
·10 months agoAs noted above, simply visiting that offending site does not give them any opportunity to access your password. (They could put up a lookalike fake eBay login page and hope to get your password by fooling you into a login attempt, but that does not sound like what you are describing here.)
If the offending site is no longer available, it may be that their provider has nuked the website, or the site is configured to reject contacts from any IP address (e.g. yours) that visits them too much.
The most likely explanation is that you have come across one of many sites that copy the visible details of eBay listings to create their own. If their asking price is higher than the original eBay listing, they may be planning to buy the original when they get a sale, ship it to their buyer and pocket the difference. If their asking price is lower than the original, they may simply be hoping to grab their buyer's payment info (e.g. credit card payment details).
broto_64
·10 months agoActually...
That doesn't really help but so much, especially with people using easy passwords.
First off 16+ characters, alpha numeric upper and lower case with symbols.
Then, two-factor authentication.
No more changing passwords.