eBay

vinyltap_11 · ‎05-04-2020

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?

vinyltap_11 · ‎05-05-2020

Kayne The Assassin, music to my ears. My wife and I looked at each other and laughed when the CSR told us to ship the orders. Imagine the nightmare involved... we pay around $200 for the labels, half of them are probably undeliverable, half of the customers have by now reported the fraud, I mean, I have nothing better to do than worry about 90 additional items, all our lowest priced **bleep** that is only there for people to get free shipping? Sure, add some nightmare to your nightmare. My wife, she's really smart btw, she said screw it, and took all those listings down. She removed all of our under $5 items. Not only because of this recent fraud, but because the profits are slim, we might as well give them away as free gifts. So already we have one positive outcome!
We look to be about half way through this ordeal. About half of the affected customers have contacted me or eBay. We're not shipping anything. I have messaged everyone who was hacked, many have replied, and those who we do not hear from we plan on eventually cancelling those orders as well.

But, don't get discouraged. eBay customer service has always been hit or miss. This is by far the worst experience we have had in 8 years, but hey, we knew we were going to have to do most of the work. You learn what to expect from them, and our expectations are pretty low. At least my bank account or my PayPal didn't get hacked like these poor customers. And yes, you would think their CSR's would be trained to deal with fraud, but I bet since their split with PayPal, they wash their hands once the money clears. Also, whenever my seller rating has been hurt through no fault of my own, eBay has always made good in on it the end. Overall we have had a lot of success with eBay, and I'm not even close to being fed up.

Thanks for your reply, it made me laugh.

valueaddedresource · ‎05-06-2020

@vinyltap_11 - Out of curiosity, if you don't mind sharing, is PayPal keeping their fee on all of the orders you canceled or are they working with you since you said they told you the transactions appeared fraudulent?

It occurred to me this situation could have been an even bigger nightmare given PayPal's changes in regard to keeping fees on canceled orders. If they had been higher ticket items, you could have easily been out quite a lot in fees with so many orders. Even with them being under $5, just on principle I don't think it is right if this whole situation costs you even a penny.

Hang in there. You are absolutely doing the right thing to protect yourself, don't let anyone make you doubt it for a second.

vinyltap_11 · ‎05-06-2020

Haha, what do you think? Truth is I don't know, but I am pretty confident it won't happen without a fight from me. I only spoke with PayPal once, they were the most helpful. I did ask the rep if I would be credited the fees if cancelled, and she was not sure. Since she was working from home she needed to find out the answer remotely, and at that point I wanted to be off the phone. I never waited around to get the answer, but she did make it sound like there were some special 'covid' rules that she thought may cover them? I don't know, I'll deal with it later.

Right now I am in the middle of cancelling all of the orders. I finally heard back from eBay, they affirmed that if I suspect the orders are fraud, and I cancel them under 'buyer asked to cancel order', it will NOT hurt my seller rating.

They are all low cost items, but we found a few more, a few from last week that actually shipped. There looks like a total of 85 customers, 108 orders, 108 items. Some people were hit twice. But even $2 orders, after shipping and taxes come to $5. Its not as bad as it could be, but this isn't just $100 we're dealing with. My wife did a rough estimate and it looks like the total comes between $4-500. PayPal fees on that is certainly not nothing.

Thanks for the encouraging words.

vinyltap_11 · ‎05-06-2020

@kensgiftshop wrote:
@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.

But there isn't a problem with the address.
I've shipped there and had no problems.

This is just wrong. Just because PayPal accepted the payment , does not mean the order is legitimate. All they do is match the addresses to the billing address. If you received 60 'out of the ordinary' orders, all going to one address, no matter if its a forwarding service or not, and then half of those orders were confirmed fraud - not by me but by the customer's, you would ship the other 30? You wouldn't think something was off?

And there is more than one forwarding company in Doral/Miami. After more research, the address used for the orders isn't even for a forwarding company, it's for an international vegetable distributor. If you search the address there are plenty of red flags that indicate that this address has been used before by fraudsters. I have been doing this for a long time, I ship to forwarding services all the time. My gut said there was something wrong and I was right. Almost half of these orders are now confirmed, by customers, to be fraud.