EBay Scam

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From a newsletter I subscribe to. Though it worth passing along...

Today's focus: Watch out for this eBay fraud technique

By M. E. Kabay

Longtime friend and colleague Stephen Cobb sends the following
warning about an auction-related scam ("I" refers to Stephen
throughout and names have been changed to avoid lawsuits):
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In early April, I failed to win an auction for an $800/£420 item
by just a few pounds. The item was listed by someone in South
Gloucestershire, England. I think the listing itself was
entirely legitimate. A few days later I was contacted via eBay
e-mail, supposedly by the seller, saying:

"You expressed interest in Item number 6165275772 by bidding,
however the auction has ended with another member as the high
bidder. In compliance with eBay policy, the seller of that item
is making this Second Chance Offer to you at your bid price of
£415.00. The seller has issued this Second Chance Offer because
the winning bidder was unable to complete the transaction."

However, the name associated with this message, "Dave Alabaz,"
did not seem to match the lister of the item (far722 - but those
names are sometimes obscure). When I contacted Dave via his
Yahoo e-mail address he asked for my mailing address. I felt
this made him sound legit and gave it to him (it is not exactly
a secret) along with an offer to pay him via PayPal. But he
turned this down, telling me to follow instructions in the
message that I would get from eBay.

I did then receive e-mail from aw-confirm@ebay.com stating, "You
have agreed to purchase the following eBay item from far722 on
Mar-29-05." The message asked me to pay through Western Union.
The seller gave me the name and street address of the Western
Union recipient as Patsy Alabaz, in London, not South
Gloucestershire.

Here is some of the e-mail:

"Currently, this seller has a US$ 20,000.00 deposit in an eBay
managed purchase protection account. Transactions with this eBay
seller are covered by purchase protection against fraud and
description errors. For your safety, this account was locked
today, for 30 days time. The seller is unable to withdraw any
money from it, within this period."

This sounded fishy and the source of the HTML message looked
fishy. One disguised link led to a login at Yahoo e-mail! So I
went to the eBay Q&A forum and described this stuff. Everyone
there shouted SCAM!

Presumably this is perpetrated by someone watching the bidding
for a high-end item, then hitting one or more "losers" with
e-mail to their eBay bidding ID, correctly listing their losing
bids and offering to sell them the exact same item. Quite
enticing to a keen buyer, even though logic tells you that the
scammer very definitely does not have the item - we are talking
about serial-numbered items here - it went to the auction
winner.

But of course the weak link in any scam is getting the cash from
the mark, and if this truly is a fraudulent transaction the
scammer seems to be using Patsy Alabaz to get paid (a real
person or an ironic pseudonym?).

There may be another cutout in this scam that allows the scammer
to get the money despite there being no Patsy at that address.
But just in case it was worth pursuing, I passed the information
along to the security folks at eBay. I did not reply to Mr.
Alabaz but I'd like to think that eBay did, and arranged to have
someone from Scotland Yard meet Patsy Alabaz when she went to
collect payment.

The simple lesson is don't fall for Second Chance offers. The
bigger lesson is to think twice about buying big-ticket items
over the Internet. A few days after the "Patsy" incident, I came
across a Kubota tractor legitimately listed for sale on a
tractor dealer's Web site, but fraudulently listed on eBay. The
latter listing used the same photos but offered a much lower
price, payable by money order to an address in Europe. When I
contacted the real owner of the tractor he told me the Secret
Service were already on the case.
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