Increase in buyer scams

[sant_1896]

I’m not a professional seller. I sometimes use eBay when I have things I want to sell that I no longer need or want.  
I’ve sold some camera items on eBay and each time:

1. I was pinged by buyers wanting me to end early and sell offline.  I Did not and reported the buyer to eBay.  
2. Sold the item, for more than it actually was worth and received a message Saying “thank you for selling to me. Can you send the item to this address:____” I told him that I would send the item to the eBay address listed.  
Twice the person telling me to send to another address was not the listed buyer. It would be easy to miss and summon us eBay, clearly they could fall for this scam. 
3. Three times I’ve been asked to send my item to either a business address in New York City, a reshipper in Doral, Florida, or a reshipper in Dover Delaware. 
4. twice the listed eBay address A commercial address in New York and Will is a re-shipper in Dover.  The last time the buyer paid more The item was actually Selling for in general. 
5. twice, New York virus who said they needed it for a special shoot and as quickly as possible. That’s suspicious because who buys something on eBay when they need it for a specific date?  
6. Two NY buyers claimed they did not receive what they ordered.  I refunded one and took the hit. What was returned to me was not what I sent  

Another buyer recently told me he received a box of rocks.  I had witnesses to the packing and shipping. 

Since both of the last two sales followed the exact same pattern ( in the auction, send it to a different address, another account Pretending to be the buyer asking me to send it somewhere else, high payment…) with all of the the elements above, do you believe that these people are working in concert?
Is eBay doing anything to stop this?  

Am I going to be shafted for an expensive camera? 
 

[sextons-sweet-deals]

If you use eBay's international shipping service, you will be protected by eBay. 

If you don't offer to ship internationally and review your buyer's profile, it should state what country they are in. The shipping address will probably be a U.S. freight forwarder. 

There are great international buyers that use freight forwarders. You just have to do the homework on them and decide if it is worth it. 

[12345jamesstamps]

You have the option of selling items domestic only.

Although I never had problems with "freight forward" I wouldn't send anything high value.

I do take a photo of package with postage on it going freight forward and send it to buyer letting buyer know I know it is going freight forward and it may take longer to reach them in an email.

I have blocked those buyers who want it sent to a different address even before they buy or bid on something.

When I did auctions I kinda kept an eye on them every day to see who is bidding...those with too many bid retractions....no feedbacks....very new eBayer(not guest accounts) might or might not get blocked from further bidding.

[monica-sells]

Your due diligence is commendable. I personally have not had any issues with freight forwarders. But I am not selling in the higher scam categories.

Not being critical, but Your reluctance to sell based on what you 'feel' is a good indicator that you are in the wrong business. No online venue is 100% safe from scammers......ebay seems to be the target of choice due to it's worldwide presence. More sellers = more targets, more exposure, more scammers...it's not rocket science.....

and when someone comes in the thread and boasts about another venue "that does not allow freight forwarder purchases", I will let you determine just how the venue can determine that......it's laughable

[purplean_58]

I have been a target for professional scammers with a camera I have recently had listed as well.  It has happened 3 times at this point and the last transaction I am still on the fence about whether it was a scam or possibly a legit transaction.   The problem is while trying to do due diligence before a recent snow storm the seller added a note on the sale to upgrade the shipping requesting its arrival by a certain date which raised a red flag.  The problem was there was no prior discussion about that arrangement.   They requested a cancelation that I overlooked during the snow storm and then opened a case.  I was completely ok with the transaction being canceled.  Where I am not ok is Ebay charging me a selling fee over $233 for a camera I didn't ship due to the unsure circumstances of the transaction with the strong arm shipping request.  I have reached out to ebay's unhelpful customer service twice so far.  They are useless unfortunately for a resolutionfor for the seller.   I appealed the fee but they wrote back an email (addressing the buyer) that wasn't even relevant to the call I had the other day and the request to waive the fee.  I am at a complete loss on where to go from here.  I replied to the email with more explanation of what the appeal was for but I need to see what to do if the request continues to fall on deaf ears.  Anyone else had a similar situation that was remedied differently then mine?

[tiberius848]

I once had a buyer open a chargeback after getting a high ticket item. I called the number associated with their account and they had some strange phone system that made sound effects.

Like I said "Are you the person that charged back on this ebay order" and their phone system made  "hand clapping" noises to mock me.

Very strange and clearly they were a professional scammer. 

This person was a "doctor" though with a large digital footprint so I had a lot of their personal information. Strange that someone working as a doctor feels the need to scam others.. I would think they have enough money to live comfortably but apparently some people are just evil.

Well anyways, in that case I told them before hanging up that if they didn't undo the chargeback I would pursue legal actions.

They undid the chargeback that night since apparently I scared them.

You DO have options.. police reports, small claims court, submitting them to collections etc.

The question is how much you are willing to do for your time and stress.

I was just lucky my scare tactic worked in that case.

Was a lot of stress and time to deal with it though.

So yeah there are some definite bad actors out there.

And yeah eBay does very little to protect sellers. Once things go bad you are on your own.