Selling on eBay - Received Offer for More than My Price

"Voice of C. Montgomery Burns" (voiceofcmb)
03/23/2016 at 14:14 • Filed to: None

Hello out there Oppo. I know this isn’t necessarily car related but I figure that some of you have experience selling on eBay and may be able to give some tips.

I do IT work for a smaller company and we sell old equipment to reinvest into the department. I’ve sold a couple things so far without any issues, and the experience has been as expected, although neither buyer gave me any feedback, positive or negative (those bastards).

I listed an old laptop for a fixed price on eBay with a “Best Offer” qualification. Within minutes, a user that just registered the same day, sends me an offer for $20 higher than the fixed-price I set which is advertised as “free shipping”. In his offer comment, he said something to the extent of extra for shipping .

This set some alarms in my head, why is this guy offering more than my fixed-price? I sent him a message asking about this and explaining why I was concerned and have yet to hear back.

Is this a common type of scam? Is it still easy to get scammed on eBay, in general? Any advice is appreciated.

DISCUSSION (19)

Pixel > Voice of C. Montgomery Burns
03/23/2016 at 14:19

SCAM!

Voice of C. Montgomery Burns > Pixel
03/23/2016 at 14:23

Thanks, is this a common approach?

JDIGGS > Voice of C. Montgomery Burns
03/23/2016 at 14:23

Sounds like a scam.

I went to sell an xbox around end of November. It was purchased bin immediately and I actually spent the money on something else before checking to see it was purchased by a person registered that day. Upon more investigation I figured out someone had actually bought a bunch probably close to 30 of these pacakage deals within the previous 24hrs, all with zero transactions e.g. fake users.

My guess is someone went through and did this shady crap because they knew once people like me and the other sellers realized it was a hoax, they had probably already sold their own item from a different account presumably because there were so many less offerings.

Group B Enthusiast - Captain of the supercharged barge > Voice of C. Montgomery Burns
03/23/2016 at 14:25

In my experience, if someone seems shady on eBay, they are. I usually don’t respond to any offers or inquiries unless the person goes out of their way to show that they aren’t scamming me.

Hope that helps!

Pixel > Pixel
03/23/2016 at 14:25

Now that I got that out of the way, it is more common than ever for scams on ebay.

They are probably either going to send you a fake check for it and get your item for free, or they are going to send you a fake check for even more and ask you to refund the difference(which they pocket and you get screwed for when the check comes back as bad). Or they are going to send you a paypal payment and then claim they never got the item and get the paypal payment reversed.

The extra $20 is to appeal to your greed, this way you’re not paying as much attention to anything hinky they may be doing.

My advice is to be extremely careful. If they pay by check (especially bank check), get the check looked at by the bank and confirmed as valid before you even box up the goods. If they pay by paypal photograph the laptop(including turned on) and how you packaged it, and get tracking & delivery confirmation. If they overpay or in any way want you to refund cash to them just shred any payment they’ve sent and mail them back the bits./throw them away.

The Ghost of Oppo > Voice of C. Montgomery Burns
03/23/2016 at 14:26

If the sale was for a car, I’d say maybe it was legit, but for a computer it definitely sounds like a scam.

Voice of C. Montgomery Burns > Pixel
03/23/2016 at 14:31

Thank you, that’s good information.

That's gonna leave a mark! > Voice of C. Montgomery Burns
03/23/2016 at 14:38

Scam, Scam Scam Run!

Dru > Voice of C. Montgomery Burns
03/23/2016 at 15:49

I’ll beat the dead horse, it's a scam. It's happened to me at least twice. Never fell for it though. Usually some odd story about a military serviceman/woman stationed offshore goes with it, at least when selling a car.

AMGtech - now with more recalls! > Voice of C. Montgomery Burns
03/24/2016 at 03:26

Where’s that dead horse? I brought a stick!

Anyway... Tried selling a PS4 on eBay in the two months leading up to Christmas. Every time the auction would just about close someone, or multiple people, would bid way over asking price. Most of them would send a message with terrible grammar and ask for my personal email or phone number, or say they would send a check or some such nonsense that would circumvent eBay. As soon as I said I wouldn’t do that they would go dark and eBay would close the account within days. Twice they even closed the account and cancelled the transaction before I even realized the item “sold”.

The best attempt however, was the first attempt. That guy did everything right, though his account was brand new and had no previous transactions. His English was excellent and he provided a real shipping address via eBay. All messages were via eBay. It got weird when he paid. I received a message from eBay saying he had paid and that I should ship the item. This was a message in my account, not some random email that looked like it was from eBay. But when I went to ship it a warning popped up that said something along the lines of “WAIT, THIS ITEM HASN’T BEEN PAID FOR, DON’T SHIP IT!” I called eBay about this and they confirmed it hadn’t actually been paid for, even though I could still look at my screen and see a big message saying “PAID”. The eBay guy on the phone said not to ship it so I didn’t. The “buyer” continued pestering me to ship it, swearing up and down that he had paid. I gave him/eBay a few days to try to resolve it and filed an unpaid item case. Never heard from him again and his account was shut down. To this day I can go back through my transaction history and it says it was paid for on one particular screen, but unpaid on all other screens for that item.

After 6 or 7 failed attempts thanks to scammers I gave up and just kept it.

Voice of C. Montgomery Burns > AMGtech - now with more recalls!
03/24/2016 at 09:24

Thanks for your experience. Do you have any insight on this new message I received? The person bought it out-right at my $450 buy it now price with free shipping but then asked me for an updated invoice with shipping and included this sketchy message:

Hello. 1. send me your PayPal email i.D or login into your PayPal account and send me an invoice to my PayPal email ID:(r****@yahoo.com) because i need to verify it first by pay pal if maybe its genuine or not 2, send me information about the package by attaching a picture,also ebay user ID and iterm number 3, send me the total amount of the package,including with an overnight (Next day air) 24hrs shipment price by Fedex or Ups. Thanks.

As I said, I’m new to eBay so I don’t know if this is normal. I looked up the address he/she wants me to send it to and it’s a business which doesn’t make me feel good about it either.

pip bip - choose Corrour > Voice of C. Montgomery Burns
03/24/2016 at 09:26

scammer.

Voice of C. Montgomery Burns > Pixel
03/24/2016 at 09:26

Pixel - Can you throw your input on this situation? Same item :/

The person bought it at my $450 buy it now price with free shipping but then asked me for an updated invoice with shipping and included this sketchy message:

As I said, I’m new to eBay so I don’t know if this is normal. I looked up the address he/she wants me to send it to and it’s a business which doesn’t make me feel good about it either.

Voice of C. Montgomery Burns > pip bip - choose Corrour
03/24/2016 at 09:31

Thanks pip. Do you have any feelings on this that came in last night? Same item.

The person bought it out-right at my $450 buy it now price with free shipping but then asked me for an updated invoice with shipping and included this sketchy message:

As I said, I’m new to eBay so I don’t know if this is normal. I looked up the address he/she wants me to send it to and it’s a business which doesn’t make me feel good about it either.

Pixel > Voice of C. Montgomery Burns
03/24/2016 at 09:34

Absolutely a scam.

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Payments/Bu…

You email them and they send you a fake paypal payment notification in hopes that you mail the item before checking your paypal account and seeing you weren’t actually paid.

Reject the purchase, report the buyer, block them and move on.

Handy tip, if you get a suspicious looking email, grab a random unique sentence or phrase out of it an search it as a phrase on google. If it is a standard scame someone else will have likely posted the email online. I googled

“Hello. 1. send me your PayPal email i.D or login into your PayPal account and send me an invoice to my PayPal email”

To find the post above an others .

Voice of C. Montgomery Burns > Pixel
03/24/2016 at 09:35

Thank you again, sir. I’m luckily very cautious but you’ve been a big help.

pip bip - choose Corrour > Voice of C. Montgomery Burns
03/24/2016 at 09:36

it doesn’t seem right.

nothing to me makes sense about it.

Pixel > Voice of C. Montgomery Burns
03/24/2016 at 09:39

No problem. Always glad to help someone avoid getting scammed.

AMGtech - now with more recalls! > Voice of C. Montgomery Burns
03/24/2016 at 10:30

Definitely a scam. He’s asking you to bypass eBay and it’s built in safety systems. Also he’s asking for a bunch of information that would already be listed in the ad. They “bought” it, it’s on them to take the next step and submit payment via eBay. I would send a message saying “please submit payment through eBay or I will open an unpaid item case”, or something like that. Make sure to let them know you won’t go outside of eBay. You could even mention that their requests make them sound like a scam.