Running eBay is an awful, awful company thread

Has anyone run into fraudulent Buy-It-Now'ers? I listed similar items this week and two of the four were Bought Now. Both were "bought" by people who hijacked others' identities.

I don't get it. The only way these people screw me is to make me relist the items and make me pay double the fees to eBay (which I have no intention of doing).

Any tips on avoiding these pieces of trash? Any tips on getting my fee money back from eBay (or rather, on getting eBay to agree to me not paying them, since I pay for my fees every once in a while, rather than having them automatically deducted)???

 

I've never listed, only bought.
Have to say I've always had great experiences so far, except that it's far, far cheaper and quicker to have something mailed from the U.K. or Hong Kong to Canada than from the U.S - which amazes me.

 

File a complaint with ebay... if they never pay and the dispute is in your favor, the money automatically goes back

 

Attention HeinekenMan ... please pick up the nearest courtesy phone.

 

That happened to me a few weeks back.

I listed a pair of basketball shoes on there which I expected to fetch anywhere from $40-$50. So one guy -- with just one prior positive feedback, for a pair of German lederhosen, no less -- opens the bidding at my minimum of $39.99. Fine.

Well, over the course of the week he continued to come back and place higher and higher bids, even though no one else had placed one. On the night the auction was to close, a few others came in and got the bidding up to $70. Great for me, or so I thought.

So with about two minutes left this same asshole jumps in and places about 15 bids, the final being for $224. I'm like, 'What the FUCK?!?!?!' I knew I wasn't going to get paid, and that I'd have to go through all the bullshit hassle of filing for a final value fee credit and everything.

About two days later I get an email from eBay telling me not to honor the bid because they believe someone had their ID hijacked. Well no shit. I have a friend who had the same thing happen on an item that wound up going for thousands of dollars recently as well.

So I had to jump through the hoops, first file a non-paying bidder complaint, let the week lapse and then file for my credit. But I did receive it. Unfortunately it seems like this is just another thing sellers are going to have to be prepared to deal with in listing stuff.

 

If you were going to be a dick and place fraudulent bids, why not just go hog-wild and, say, bid hundreds of thousands of dollars on a Velvet Underground album or something?

Oh....it's been done? Shit.

 

And THAT is what happens when the mentally retarded among us answer those phishing e-mails from Greece that use the eBay logoing and fonts.

 

With one exception, I've had nothing but good experience as both a buyer and a seller.

One time, I was selling a concert ticket to a Bruce show -- the only thing tricky about the situation was that the person was going to be sitting next to me and that I had to pick up the tix on the day of the show (it was a small venue). The bidding was going very well, and most of the bidders knew the right questions to ask. I wanted payment in cash, but only after I had the ticket in hand. At the last minute, someone bid $50 over the highest price. The night before the show, he e-mailed me to "cancel" his bid, saying that he didn't trust me. After some nasty e-mail with him and his "lawyer", who turned out to be a friend in law school, I was able to sell the ticket to the second highest bidder for $50 less. I eventually got a $50 check for the difference after sending a draft of a small claims complaint.

 

I once bought what was advertised as a first edition of the book Hunt For Red October because it was the only first edition missing from my Tom Clancy collection and it was far-and-away the most expensive.

Before I bid on the item, I asked the seller if it was a first edition from Naval Institute Press? (Most of Clancy's books have been printed by Putnam but Red October was first printed by Naval Institute Press, a smaller company that made a small first run. When the option for the movie was purchased, it was re-released by Putnam. The NIP first edition is very pricy while the Putnam copies are relatively inexpensive.) She told me that it was.

I ended up winning the bid with a good price (somewhere around $125) but when the book arrived, it clearly was not what I had been told it was (it was the Putnam first edition). When I called the seller on it, she reluctantly returned the money. I posted a negative comment about my experience and she fumed at me for a couple of weeks because she didn't like negative comments and she wanted me to retract it. I probably would have if she 1) hadn't insisted to strongly and 2) didn't answer my question correctly about the printer -- even though the info if very easy to find in the book.

 

My grito of indignation to the eBay milleu:

Where's that fucking Boston Bruins jacket I paid for back in November?

 

Did she hit you with a retaliatory negative? That seems to be everyone's M.O. on eBay, regardless of whether the party that left them one did nothing wrong.