@kr_nine wrote:
I had an interesting sales experience recently. I wanted to share it to see if others encountered it. I sold a phone on ebay a month ago. After receiving the item, the buyer complained that the phone didn't hold a charge. Since this was a phone I used regularly for a year, I knew that the phone had a pretty good battery life. In good faith, I asked him to ship it back to me and sent him an ebay return label. The buyer then uploaded a different tracking number. I assumed he shipped it on his own. The tracking showed it was delivered to my town and ebay asked me to issue him a refund. But I never received it and I never had missing items before. Here is where things got interesting. Several discrepancies showed up:
- The buyer's address was in Miami, but the tracking info for the return originated from CA
- I have a home address, but the tracking info says delivered at front desk
- The buyer disappeared from ebay
Now, ebay didn't allow me to raise a dispute online. So, I called them up and after 10 minutes on the phone, they agreed to refund my money back. This scam seemed unusal to me as the buyer took the pains of sending a fake mail to some address in the same town. He was relying on the fact that ebay does an auto refund within a very short period of the tracking info showing delivery. He may have succeeded if I had not been paying attention to this and spent the time to investigate and call up ebay.
I used to work in a postal outlet in Canada, and you'd be surprised how brazen some of these scammers are to try and get help with their scams. I knew of someone who mailed an empty box once (a customer, but not my customer), while at the outlet, he sent a picture of the package with postage on it as "proof of sending" (but failed to realize the post office won't refund an empty box, yes, they know how much it weighs and how big it is).
Another time I got a phone call (and she called me more than once) to tell me she lost her tracking number and needed to provide one so she could get a refund on an item that wasn't received. I told her I can't give her tracking numbers, she needs to either find the receipt, or hope that it turns up, but there's nothing I can do. She called back a while later telling me she wanted to know samples of tracking numbers from a certain day so she could research them and see if any went to the big box store she was returning her phone to. I told her we don't do that, it's private information for the customer, find your receipt. She called back the next day to ask for examples of how tracking numbers were formatted at my postal outlet. I finally said "I'm not helping you with this scam." End of discussion, she didn't call back.
Cheers, C.
