Ah, the joys of ebay, part 2

And here we go again….
I thought I had sold my laptops finally. There’s still a chance the buyer may come through on one of them. But, the toshiba….
Third auction on the toshiba finally got all the way through to the end. I normally won’t accept bidders with zero feedback, but I thought I’d take a chance on this one…
Well, turns out that the person who won the auction was actually someone’s teenage daughter who was off playing on the computer while the folks were out of town. The girl set up her own ebay account and started winning auctions. The parents were just lucky that she forgot their paypal account info, or she would have tried to buy all of this stuff as well.
The people apologized and were nice enough to help me clear things up through ebay, but it put me back at square one again…
So here’s hoping the fourth time is the charm…
So far… only one scammer…
hello seller am so much interested in your item firstly i will like to know the condition of the item and i will like to know maybe you ship abroad because am getting it for a friend in west africa and i will be willing to pay you the sum of US$600 through western union auction payment(money order) including shipping through either USPS or Fedex to west africa”
ebay already nailed this one before I could forward it.
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Ah, the joys of ebay…

So, I’ve been on an ebay kick of late, trying to sell crap I have been meaning to sell for a while as well as some stuff I just don’t use.
That went pretty well. Then, I got the itch to upgrade my laptop. But, in order to do that, I decided I needed to get rid of the two I already have.
Well, selling laptops on ebay is an entirely new adventure than selling anything else online. There are a number of scammers watching the laptops sales who either send you emails with sob stories, or worse, use the buy it now option on your laptop, then send you the same goofy story.
Every single one of these comes from a newly created ebay user with zero feedback. Often, the accounts were created the day they started sending questions. Buy it now bastards are the worst, because then I have to spend time fighting with ebay to get credit for the auction, then start over. Africa appears to be the ‘destination’ of choice, for whatever reason.
The technical term of what these guys are trying to do is called ‘phishing,’ where they are trying to get users to submit personal information for identity theft.
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