Fraud orders on my store

[vinyltap_11]

This past weekend I had several - like 90, fraudulent orders placed on my eBay store. They basically bought all of my lowest priced items, and all of the orders were to be shipped to the same address in Doral Florida or Miami Florida. The address and zip code was always the same, but the city was sometimes different, either Doral or Miami. All of the buyers were either brand new, or had very low feedback scores, so they targeted people who don't use eBay that often. Some people realized what happened, and they contacted me or eBay. I received correspondence from maybe 10 or 12 of the orders. I called eBay and they basically told me to ship the rest. They said I had no way of determining for sure if the orders were fraudulent and that I was covered by seller protections anyway.  The situation is pretty clear, and there is a lot more to this than I am going to explain here. Bottom line is, what I  need help with is this... For the orders that I know are fraud, for those people who did not contact eBay to report the fraud, I plan on cancelling those orders. My question is if I cancel 50+ orders and select 'problem with address' as the reason for the cancellation, will that hurt my seller rating?

[7606dennis]

It sounds like the shipping addresses are those of forwarding companies.  Have all the items been paid for and have you check with PayPal to see that the money is there.?

[coolections]

Check your paypal, does it say OK to ship and have you been paid ? If both are yes, then you need to ship. The other answer was correct, those are forwarding companies who purchase items and reship to customers. If paypal says it's OK to ship and you cancel all those orders you will probably be booted from selling on Ebay.

[vinyltap_11]

Yes, the address is one of those forwarding addresses. Funnily enough, if you google the address the first link is to a yelp review of negative comments from people who had their credit cards hacked and shipped to this address.

All items are paid for and when I spoke with PayPal, they are the ones who confirmed to me that is looks like fraud.  They said all of the orders came from the same region. I have been in this situation before, where I knew an order was fraud and I shipped it anyway. 1 week later I was hit with an eBay notice, the money was reversed on paypal and I lost the item.

Now all of these items were under $5. But eBay is nuts if they think I am going to ship out 50+ fraud orders. I am not wasting the money on the labels, and it's not worth the headache once the victims notice.  As mentioned in my initial message, I did receive 12 notices from eBay about suspicious orders that they had to cancel and I should not ship. All 12 of those are the same address in Florida. This isn't rocket science, the hacker was testing these poor people's payment methods by purchasing low cost items. If I ship these out I will pay for it later, so I would rather just cancel the orders. Will my seller rating take a hit if I cancel that many orders?  

[vinyltap_11]

So as a seller, if I don't feel comfortable shipping something and have good reason to believe the order is fake, I have to ship it because eBay says so? That's ridiculous.  Just because eBay doesn't take fraud that seriously doesn't mean I should play along.  The orders are fraud, of that there is no question. If I cancel, no one will complain. My question is if it will hurt my seller rating. 

[toooldtorock]

"My question is if it will hurt my seller rating."

It's a safe bet you will be spending a lot of time on the phone with ebay.

I have countries I do not want to ship to blocked in PayPal.

[vinyltap_11]

But if I cancel the order and choose 'there is a problem with the address', what's the problem? It's technically true. 

[inhawaii]

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@vinyltap_11 wrote:

But if I cancel the order and choose 'there is a problem with the address', what's the problem? It's technically true. 

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I understand your hesitation to ship. I would pose this question to ebay customer service.

Good luck and stay safe!

[candd205]

Just a thought, you could try contacting the other purchasers who have not contacted you yet and see if they placed the order, they would be appreciative to know their accounts were hacked in some way.

[vinyltap_11]

Yea, thats what it seems I must do. I think it will be fine, I'm just worried about the volume of cancellations.

eBay initially told me to ship the orders. They said the same thing people here are saying, if PayPal says its ok then its ok.  BTW since I opened this thread a few hours ago 5 more customers have contacted me to cancel, that they had their accounts hacked and did not place the orders.  I did a full count. There are 73 fraud orders with the Florida address. 19 have contacted either me or eBay to cancel.  What a nightmare. 

[vinyltap_11]

I contacted about 12 of them. But not one has responded so far. I counted and there are a total of 73 fraud orders with the Florida address, 19 have contacted either me or eBay to cancel.   

[valueaddedresource]

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@vinyltap_11 wrote:

Yea, thats what it seems I must do. I think it will be fine, I'm just worried about the volume of cancellations.

eBay initially told me to ship the orders. They said the same thing people here are saying, if PayPal says its ok then its ok.  BTW since I opened this thread a few hours ago 5 more customers have contacted me to cancel, that they had their accounts hacked and did not place the orders.  I did a full count. There are 73 fraud orders with the Florida address. 19 have contacted either me or eBay to cancel.  What a nightmare. 

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@vinyltap_11  - I'm so sorry to hear you are going through this.  eBay appears to have some serious security problems, but they don't seem to be taking it too seriously.

We've been dealing with a slightly different issue, but possibly related.  We've discovered a triangulation fraud scheme that is selling items on eBay, then using retail websites to "drop ship" to their eBay buyers using stolen credit cards.  We believe that the eBay accounts being used to perpetrate this fraud may also be hacked/compromised accounts.

 https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Warning-Retail-Arbitrage-Credit-Card-Fraud/td-p/30822324

[vinyltap_11]

From the post you linked: 

"Single item orders – On our direct sites we usually have some kind of free shipping or free gift over $X promotion running, so people typically buy multiple items to get to that minimum.  We do get single item orders that are legitimate, but 20-30+ orders for the same single item in a short amount of time is not typical for us and would be a possible red flag. 

Different bill to and ship to addresses – Again, we do get legitimate orders that have different bill to and ship to addresses, so different addresses doesn’t automatically mean they are fraud,  but we are seeing far more than usual in the last month or so.  The fraudsters seem to have the correct billing info because it does match the address and CVV checks.  Once they verify that a card will go through, they use that same card repeatedly, so look out for same billing name/address being used repeatedly with different ship to addresses."

This is similar to what happened to us. Over 70 orders of items under $5. Many for the same items. These items are almost never sold by themselves, They are added to larger orders to get free shipping. We noticed that first. Then, the ship to address (mostly) going to the Florida address.  Interesting post, thank you for sharing. 

[valueaddedresource]

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@vinyltap_11 wrote:

From the post you linked: 

"Single item orders – On our direct sites we usually have some kind of free shipping or free gift over $X promotion running, so people typically buy multiple items to get to that minimum.  We do get single item orders that are legitimate, but 20-30+ orders for the same single item in a short amount of time is not typical for us and would be a possible red flag. 

Different bill to and ship to addresses – Again, we do get legitimate orders that have different bill to and ship to addresses, so different addresses doesn’t automatically mean they are fraud,  but we are seeing far more than usual in the last month or so.  The fraudsters seem to have the correct billing info because it does match the address and CVV checks.  Once they verify that a card will go through, they use that same card repeatedly, so look out for same billing name/address being used repeatedly with different ship to addresses."

This is similar to what happened to us. Over 70 orders of items under $5. Many for the same items. These items are almost never sold by themselves, They are added to larger orders to get free shipping. We noticed that first. Then, the ship to address (mostly) going to the Florida address.  Interesting post, thank you for sharing. 

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Glad it was helpful! We're still trying to fight the fraud and eBay has not been very helpful.

We have also had two orders on our eBay store today that we received notices not to ship due to "unauthorized usage", so for what it's worth, you are not alone and I believe eBay is dealing with some massive issues right now.

Kudos to you for not following what support told you in the face of such obvious and blatant fraud.  We have to look out for ourselves in these situations, because eBay definitely isn't going to do it for us.  I have had very similar frustrating conversations with support where they just refuse to see/admit what common sense and the available information very clearly shows is happening.

I sincerely hope you are able to resolve this without any negative consequences to your account due to all of the cancellations.

[valueaddedresource]

There has also been an increase in reports of log in issues on the technical issues board.  Many people complaining they can't log in or they are having captcha/authentication issues.

I believe this may be another indication that eBay is experiencing some security issues and may be tinkering with the log in process to try to compensate.