I was recently involved in a scam like this. The seller had hijacked the
account of another person so had the benefit of the positive feedback. The
seller was supposedly in Finland but the bank to which he wanted the money
sent was in Latvia. This put up a red flag to me and I asked EB*Y about the
legitimacy of the seller and received no reply. I then told the seller I
would only complete the transaction using escrow.com. After considerable
grousing he agreed if I paid the fees. I initiated the escrow deal and he
never completed his end of the transaction. Two weeks after I had contacted
EB*Y they send me a note explaining that the transaction had been bogus. I
had entered negative feedback on the account and received a scathing email
from the account owner. Apparently this was an inside deal and someone
inside EB*Y had given out passwords to enable the use of the accounts by
their accomplices. This was a $2000 deal and I received an email from
another user that had send the same amount to the seller and had not been
able to contact them since. I'm surely glad I hadn't sent any cash. I
already have two assholes to hunt down and didn't need a third.
/jim
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Andrew L Wendelborn
Sent: Friday, July 11, 2003 12:00 AM
To: olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [OM] M1 offered by ebay member(?)
>I'ts probably just me, but a "brand new" M1 outfit just smells scam to
me...
>
These scams are getting popular.
A few months ago we bid on a moderately expensive item and just missed out.
The came an email (via ebay) offering the same item.
I traced the email back to Moscow. But the ebay id (0 feedback) was
registered
in Australia. This was immediately suspicious but nonetheless we made
contact to see what would happen. The person concerned sent a photo.
He was easily caught out as lacking knowledge of what he was selling with
a few pointed questions and inability to provide another photo. We dropped
the correspondence but nonetheless received quite a few emails from Russia
over the next month.
Then someone on another list reported on nearly being caught parting with
money for an expensive piece of audio equipment. Same scenario, but
attempting to legitimize it by providing details of an agent for escrow.
Turned out the agent was bogus, but if the potential buyer had not had
the foresight to investigate that, it would have been goodbye $3K.
regards
Andrew
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