eBay

living-in-e-flat · ‎12-19-2017

I listed two cameras for sale 20 days ago. Two seperate auctions. As the auctions drew to a close, suddenly the auctions went SKY-high for the value of the items. In the last 30 seconds of the auctions, the high bidder sent me the message "Cancel my bid! I bid on the wrong item!" Of course, there wasn't enough time to cancel his bid before the auctions ended. I ended up having to cancel the auctions.

I relisted them, and just a few minutes ago in the last minutes of the auction, the bids went sky-high like before. I scrambled to get to my computer, but by the time I managed to get to eBay, the process had repeated itself. Same buyer asking me to cancel his bids, and that he bid on the wrong auction.

I also notice that the SECOND highest bidder is the same as before. I smell a scam here. I think someone is waiting on a second chance offer. I don't think I'm going to give them the satisfaction. Is there anything I can do to report these guys? Will anything result from it?

I'm not going to relist the cameras. I think I'm done selling on eBay.

mr_lincoln · ‎12-19-2017

@living-in-e-flat Might be a competitor taking yours off the market ... so you're saying 2 people bid your camera up really high? Having this happen twice in a row its not a mistake ... you can of course block the IDs that placed bids.

Regards,
Mr. Lincoln - Community Mentor

emerald40 · ‎12-19-2017

You should have blocked that buyer after he did it the first time.

living-in-e-flat · ‎12-19-2017

Hindsight, yes. And now I have, but I am betting the secondary buyer (the one who is trying to scam me using both accounts) has more than just those two. If I block his phony account, he can just make another one, and he probably already HAS multiple.

*help_no_brakes* · ‎12-19-2017

List as BIN with IPR.

Then you'll only have to worry about a SNAD Scam for the next

180 days.

a_c_green · ‎12-19-2017

@living-in-e-flat wrote:

I relisted them, and just a few minutes ago in the last minutes of the auction, the bids went sky-high like before. I scrambled to get to my computer, but by the time I managed to get to eBay, the process had repeated itself. Same buyer asking me to cancel his bids, and that he bid on the wrong auction.

I also notice that the SECOND highest bidder is the same as before. I smell a scam here. I think someone is waiting on a second chance offer.

You're close, but that's not exactly what's happening here.

What they're doing is a bid shielding scam. The lead guy bids something preposterous as a hidden maximum. Then a second bidding account (quite possibly the same guy) bids a similarly high bid, in order to push the price into the stratosphere.

I looked at your earlier attempts to sell both camera bodies, and the highest legitimate bids were $95 and $101.50. The scammer bids pushed both over $300 (for parts-or-repair camera bodies...? Yeah, right.). Then in the final minutes of the auction, the lead bidder (or the second-place guy; doesn't matter which) sends you that request to cancel, counting on you to respond in time, after which the price would have collapsed to $96 or $104.00 respectively, won with his other account. (No one else would have been ready to snipe since it looked like the price was way too high to bother with.)

You frustrated your scammer, in a way, by not responding to cancel his bid in time, thus sticking him with a high bid that he wasn't going to pay, and a Second Chance Offer to the second-place account wouldn't have sold either. You could have offered an SCO to the third-place bidder if you want; he doesn't show any connection to the eventual winner, and that price of ~$100 doesn't seem too out of line to someone who knows how to fix cameras.

So at minimum, you really needed to put the bid-shielding bidder on your Blocked Bidder List the first time he pulled this stunt, and if you had recognized the bid-shielding strategy, the second-place account needed to go, too.

As others have suggested, your best bet is really to decide what you want for these high-scam items, and list them as fixed-price BuyItNows only, no Make Offer, and with Immediate Payment Required (the checkbox option on the full listing form), so that no one can snatch the items off the market without actually paying you for them first. Good luck.

retrose1 · ‎12-19-2017

OP, you have no idea how lucky you are - you still have your merchandise.

Cameras and camera accessories are in the top ten items targeted by scammers. On top of that you are a low feedback seller listing them, low feedback seller are profiled and scammed the most because they do not know how ebay works or how to protect themselves. They make mistakes that scammers can cash in on.

My advice to you is to not list merchandise worth more than your recent selling feedback. That way you can get experience without losing your most valuable items right out of the gate.

(*Bleep*)

living-in-e-flat · ‎12-19-2017

No, I'm not going to relist them. They are going to sit in my camera case until I find a local buyer.

What I am curious about, though, is what is the bogus buyer's endgame?

I send them a broken camera and they send me back a can of green beans with a tracking label after filing an item not as described case? How can you file a not as described case on a broken item that stated it was broken?

Are they going to claim I sent them the can of green beans?

myboardid · ‎12-19-2017

They could say that, and eBay would take their side.

----------------------------
Successful and experienced seller since 1997, over 70,000 feedback, boardie since the boards were begun.

a_c_green · ‎12-19-2017

@living-in-e-flat wrote:

What I am curious about, though, is what is the bogus buyer's endgame?

I send them a broken camera and they send me back a can of green beans with a tracking label after filing an item not as described case? How can you file a not as described case on a broken item that stated it was broken?

Are they going to claim I sent them the can of green beans?

No, I think they genuinely wanted those camera bodies for parts or repair, and decided that the bid-shielding strategy was the best way to score them cheap. They could, of course, have gone further as well, and done what you're predicting, a fake return, but if that was their plan, then it wouldn't have mattered what the initial sale price was, and they could have skipped all the original rigmarole that you went through.

Yes, it's possible to file a Not As Described dispute on a broken ("parts or repair") item. Just a year or two back, there was a huge long thread about a buyer who was trying to return a parts-or-repair camera because he thought the screws were rusty on the bottom, assuming water damage, plus he couldn't figure out how to get the lens off. The seller's original response was something along the lines of, "Well, Duh, it was sold for parts."

After a lot of debate, eBay weighed in here and argued in favor of the buyer, if I remember right, saying that the seller had not specified what was wrong with the parts-or-repair camera, and so if the buyer found something wrong that hadn't been mentioned, he was entitled to return it. That was one ugly thread.

living-in-e-flat · ‎12-19-2017

As I suspected, I got a message from the "second bidder" a few minutes ago. They said that the high bidder obviously is a scammer for bidding so high, and that I should not sell to them. They (the second bidder) are "more reputable and would be more likely to follow through with a pleasant transaction". (Their message was riddled with typos, by the way.)

I replied and said "Oh, no. Actually, the high bidder has decided to pay the full amount!"

They replied and said "That truly sounds suspicious. The cameras aren't worth that much. You should cancel and sell to me instead. I can pay with Paypal immediately."

I replied with "Well, it wouldn't be fair to do it that way. Besides, the high bidder sent me a photo of the money order, and then another of them on their knees holding up a sign saying "Please forgive me for bailing on you last time!"

I have yet to get a reply. I wonder if they are trying to decide how to call my bluff without tipping their hand.

a_c_green · ‎12-19-2017

living-in-e-flat wrote:
I have yet to get a reply. I wonder if they are trying to decide how to call my bluff without tipping their hand.

Call your bluff? You're calling theirs, basically.

Now that the auctions are over, you cannot "cancel" the winning bid anyway. What you can do is send your second-place guy a Second Chance Offer. It will be for his high bid, not the collapsed price that would have resulted if you actually had cancelled the lead bid before the end of the auction, but that's not your problem. So if he wants to buy it, send him his SCO, and see what his excuse will be for declining it.

Realistically, yanking their chain is not going to lead to anything productive, and there are plenty of others to take their place. Just sell it locally.