There are a ton of fake sellers in the sort of stuff I tend to bid on but fortunately they're easy to spot by simply checking their histories.
To start with a history of twenty or less feedbacks is always a warning sign for me as, at least for the stuff I tend to buy, experienced sellers are the norm while new ones are the exception.
So I click on it and check out the history and since fake sellers are often lazy, I'll find that the feedback has been made by two to five accounts, each purchasing the same number of items and often the same actual item, usually within a very short time of each other and often leaving the same feedback or very short feedback - good seller, great deal or something else fast and easy to type.
That's definitely a fake seller.
Another thing to do is to check out the seller's entire inventory as many fake sellers will create an account and pad their reputation by selling cheap jewelry and stuffed animals for a few months to get legit feedback and then once they've got a few hundred real positive feedbacks, they add the very expensive stuff.
They do this because they are counting on the several hundred positive feedbacks to keep their seller rating high enough to survive the inevitable flood of negative hits they're going to get - if you have 1000 positive hits and then get 50 negative ones, that will keep you at 95% positive.
So look at the seller's inventory and if they're offering a $100 item but the rest of their stuff is $5 or less, then check their feedback and odds are that unless you're unlucky enough to be one of their first victims that you'll see several fake seller warnings.
Another fake seller trick is the mailing time - something shipped from your own country shouldn't take more than a week, maybe two if it is bulky or heavy, while something shipped from overseas normally takes no more than a month. If the seller is listing an estimated delivery date which is double the expected normal shipping time or longer then odds also are that you're dealing with a fake seller.
Even if none of these warning signs are present, make sure to check their feedback anyway as people will sometimes buy previously legit accounts and then use the good rating in the same way the ones selling the cheap stuff use a high rating to fool you - if you notice several complaints about items never being shipped/received then you're likely dealing with a fake seller.
So what do you do if you become the victim of one?
Always make sure to provide negative feedback the second it becomes obvious that you've been scammed, usually due to the seller refusing to provide a tracking number, the tracking number not showing any movement or the tracking number coming up as not being valid when you manually plug it into a tracking number program.
This not only helps to protect other buyers but when a seller gets too much negative feedback eBay will often times shut the seller down and getting a refund becomes far faster and easier.
Next, file a complaint with eBay or Paypal - I prefer Paypal as I've come to find that they are far faster about doing refunds.
Some scammers will try to provide the fake tracking number to eBay/Paypal so as soon as you see that they have, make sure to CALL customer service and have the person you talk to run the tracking number so they can see that it is fake.
Hold times are a bit long these days thanks to the quarantine but trust me, it is worth it to not only get your money back, but to ensure there's a black mark against this fake seller so as to help out future victims when they try to get a refund.
