@dhbookds wrote:
@itsjustasprain as to the pasted on change of address.........he would have to reprint the label within the time frame.........and I don't believe a buyer would receive notification of that. I've had to reprint, when the printer screws up........and never had a buyer question it. The fact the buyer WAS notified makes me think the seller used "print another label" for which he would have to pay so I don't think he was ripping off the cost.
I've been following this with some interest for reasons I'll get into in a second, but yes, if the seller is simply reprinting the first label as opposed to buying a second, that would not trigger an alert to the buyer because it's simply reissuing the original label again. (If you still have the Shipping window open on your machine, you can do the reprint locally, or set your Print Quantity to 2, and even eBay won't know you did it.)
The seller can indeed paste over the original address with a different new address, and as long as the second package is similar to the first in terms of weight and size, it's possible that it could get to where it's going in spite of the tracking number record showing a different original address in their internal database. The buyer of the original package will get alerts about it if they're subscribed to informed tracking, though if they get their original package anyway, they may not think anything of clearly-wrong updates about some other package going somewhere else.
The reason I thought this was interesting was due to a conversation I had with our postmaster one day while he was trying to help another customer with an eBay return that she had not actually received. The postmaster had pulled up an image of the package from within their intranet system when it went out for delivery to another address, and they were both staring at it, trying to figure out how the return label she had sent (for a game console) could have been addressed to someplace completely different. (Yeah, it was the old return-a-trinket-for-a-refund scam.) She had been following the tracking, but was amazed to see it "delivered" someplace else instead.
I politely butted in to the conversation and asked if I could have a look, as I already had a pretty good idea of what had happened. The image of the package label looked pretty convincing, except maybe for a little misalignment weirdness with the faked address, but the clincher was that the ZIP code on the pasted-in address was only 5 digits. Someone had improvised the fake replacement address with the right font and point size, but had neglected to look up the full mailing address for the new location, which would have given them the correct ZIP+4 number and not just the generic one for the whole town. Beyond that mistake, the faked label had generated no alarm bells, and would have sailed through undetected if the seller hadn't noticed it.
Granted, this was for a redirected package rather than a second one, but fiddling with the postage or tracking numbers is not necessarily going to generate a hair-trigger interception by the USPS. (They have way too much else on their plate these days.) On a couple of occasions they have even sent the same package out twice for me using the same label, after having it accidentally returned despite a valid address on the label, so a duplicate tracking number (or package) in the system isn't necessarily going to get flagged.
