Supposed scammer messaging with buyers ID?

[alex.laing]

So, I’ve had this scam before:

 someone with a random ID who is not the buyer asks me to change address before shipping.

This is potentially happening again with a new item I sold, but the messenger has the same ID as my buyer.

 They want me to ship to an address that’s in a completely different state to someone with a completely different name.

If this is a scammer, how did they send a message from the buyers ID? Did they hack their account somehow? 

I thought about messaging the buyer for confirmation, but is this potential scammer going to just intercept the message if they have access to the account?

How do I even confirm legitimacy of this request? 

[wastingtime101]

You haven't considered the obvious: your buyer is legit and used the wrong address at checkout, or your buyer is the scammer.

Buyer,

eBay requires shipment to the address on the order. Since the address submitted with your payment is not where you want this shipped I will cancel the order for you.

Seller

Then cancel problem with buyer's address.

OR

Buyer,

eBay requires shipment to the address on the order. Let me know by [date/time] if you want to cancel the order. If I don't hear back from you by then I will ship it to the address that was submitted with your payment. 

Seller

[katzrul15]

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@wastingtime101 wrote:

You haven't considered the obvious: your buyer is legit and used the wrong address at checkout, or your buyer is the scammer.

Buyer,

eBay requires shipment to the address on the order. Since the address submitted with your payment is not where you want this shipped I will cancel the order for you.

Seller

Then cancel problem with buyer's address.

OR

Buyer,

eBay requires shipment to the address on the order. Let me know by [date/time] if you want to cancel the order. If I don't hear back from you by then I will ship it to the address that was submitted with your payment. 

Seller

---

If they are someone working to Scam.....be sure to BBL.   These potential "work to take things off-site" scams are a lot of work!

[ittybitnot]

How do I even confirm legitimacy of this request? 

 @alex.laing 

You don't.  

[luckythewinner]

---

@alex.laing wrote:

How do I even confirm legitimacy of this request? 

---

If the buyer has not paid yet, I would message the buyer and tell them to change the address when they make payment. 

If the buyer has paid, I would message the buyer and tell them that in order to ship to a different address, I will need to cancel the order and they will need to buy it again and re-pay with the correct address. 

If it is the latter, I would be sure to give them a deadline to respond and tell then that I will cancel the transaction as "problem with buyer's address" if I do not hear back from them by the deadline. 

[nkmipgolf]

You do not change address on a request only ship to payment info.  Even if it is the real buyer if you do ship it to another address, he can claim they never got it and get their money refunded.  I would tell him NO, one does not do that due to eBay rules.  I have 3 addresses I get items shipped too, I just change the address before payment.

[alex.laing]

Thanks so much for all the help.

Turns out I was totally being paranoid.

At the advice of a reply here, I asked the buyer to resubmit payment after I cancelled item.

First time for everything.

Everything’s gone smoothly now.

[jayjaspersgarage]

"

First time for everything.

Everything’s gone smoothly now."

It is true that sometimes a buyer moves and updates their address along with five subscriptions, their pharmacy, drivers' license, ten credit cards , the newspaper, twenty relatives and seventy-two friends plus their banks & credit Unions and somehow never thinks about ebay or PayPal.   Sigh.

I had this happen once when a buyer wrote a day late to ask to have something sent to another address.  I mentioned that I ship within minutes of a payment so their item was already in the mail 'yesterday'.  They only moved ten miles and just drove to their old place and got the item.  

I don't let potential buyers tell me how to run my business if they haven't paid yet.  Just had a scammer from India try to trick me into sending some product to the east coast so I just cancelled his order because he couldn't figure out how to pay.  Seriously?   I cancelled with 'problem with address' as the reason because I don't mail anything to India for starters.   He also demanded that I give him the contact info for a buyer who paid for something he wanted while he was trying to scam me so I dug a little deeper and found that his account in India was suspended which is probably the reason he wanted to trick me into mailing something to a relative.