Ebay...Not Worth The Bother....Scammed?

[sausage fingers]

Felt so wound up about this i had to let it out, perhaps a warning to others. Recently sold an item on Ebay for about £25, delivery was about £8 by DHL, the guy paid by Paypal and DHL collected the item. A week went by and the guy mailed to say he hadn't received the item, i had already checked the delivery status on the DHL site and it said the item was delivered, so contacting DHL they confirmed the item had been delivered, mr x still claimed no item had been received, back to DHL and they provided a print out with delivery time, address and the chaps signature which all seemed correct. The guy now claims that its not his signature and he wasn't at home at the stated delivery time, and claims that the driver kept the item himself and forged his signature. So now my Paypal account is frozen the guy has threatened DHL with the police, and they won't speak to him anymore and it looks as if they are going to take the cost and postage out of my Paypal account. I think i've been scammed
Still an ongoing thing but it don't look good
Not a fortune i know but could have been a £500 guitar.
Looks as if Ebay and its punters have hit an all time super low.
To be fair to Mr X , perhaps the DHL driver does have the item stashed away somewhere
Rob

[Old Wild Men]

...So now my Paypal account is frozen the guy has threatened DHL with the police, and they won't speak to him anymore and it looks as if they are going to take the cost and postage out of my Paypal account...
Rob

That's where I got lost, who froze your PayPal account and why? This sounds like a dispute between your buyer and DHL.

[sausage fingers]

The guys raised a case with Ebay and Paypal, so first thing Paypal did was froze my Paypal account. Looks as if i have to go back to DHL and raise a not received item on his behalf as it looks as if they won't deal with him due to upset with DHL on the phone. The Bizzare bit is in the latest mail he claims to work for the goverment and will take this to the highest level
Just checked my Paypal account and its now open but has thirty odd quid(total amount including postage) missing out of it, pending an investigation.
Rob

[captainhaddock]

Dear Rob,
For what it's worth, you have my deepest sympathy. Your case and 100's of others reported on E-Bays' own forums
are the reason that I will never ever become an E-Bay seller. There are far too many scammers out there and the whole thing seems to be biased in their favour. I had thought of selling the odd thing on a Pick-up/Cash Only basis, but even this has attracted the odd wierdo I am led to believe. I have bought many items on E-Bay and have (Fingers Crossed) been lucky so far, the sellers have been great. I know, that given my luck, if I were to become a seller I would be scammed.
I hope that you eventually sort out your problems and that you are not made to suffer your loss twice, money and goods. All the best Philip.

[JimN]

eBay does have some weird - and some devious - people using it.

A few years ago, my son bid for and won a Levinson Blade R4 guitar (the original Swiss-made one, like a Strat only better) for £450. The seller was in N London. When we spoke by phone, he wanted us to send cash in a packet and then he'd send me the guitar. I politely told him that such an arrangement was not acceptable. He then opted for PayPal before sending it. By this time, I was getting peeved and decided to put my foot down. I told him that London's not too far and that we'd pay cash when we collected the instrument. He would not have it. There was no question of our coming to his address, or even meeting. I indicated that I was not prepared to execute the transaction in any way which risked my son's £450 plus the cost of shipping. It was collect face to face or the deal was off - and we would defend any complaints to eBay.

The seller reluctantly agreed to meet us at Highgate Underground (which has a car-park). We met there, the guitar seemed to be in good order and we paid him. When we got home, we discovered that the bridge pickup was open-circuit and needed a relatively expensive rewind.

By the most unusual of circumstances (not attributable to the seller), my son had, lying around the house, three Levinson Blade pickups he'd been given by Spencer Scott when he upgraded his own Blade. How lucky can you get? Another buyer wouldn't have been so lucky.

At least we now knew why the seller was so keen to just hand over the guitar (or preferably, send it) with no testing possible...

JN

[Fenderman]

I bought a Fender amp from ebay about 3/4 years ago. I won the bid at £75 and paid for it when the bid ended.
A week went by and no amp, so i emailed the guy and got no reply. After more emaling he replied after 3 weeks and claimed he had a death in the family and had left his brother in charge of his ebay stuff, this might have been true but i had a feeling he was telling fibs.
I finally recieved the amp after nearly 3 months of waiting. The guy had the cheek to give me negative feedback saying i had taken ages to pay! Bloody cheek!

[Amanda]

Hi,

I sent out a speaker last year, after a week the buyer started e-mailing me telling
me that it was about time I sent it, I replied that I had and gave him the details.

After a 14 day wait when the speaker never arrived I refunded him the payment.

3 weeks later the speaker turned up on my doormat, the label on it stated that he had been
out when delivery was attempted and a card had been left, because he'd not collected it
it had been sent back.

I contacted the buyer and he told me that no card had been left.

The other week I sent out a radio transceiver, next day signed for, I checked the next
day to see if had been delivered and the website reported not in card left.

I immediately contacted him and told him about this, he said no card had been left and went
to collect it from the delivery office.

Both cases were with Royal Mail.

Amanda

[sausage fingers]

Thanks for the comments feel a bit better now i've told a few people about it

Going off the Ebay topic a little way, here's a bit of frightening story......About 4 years ago I was looking for a Gibson Chet Atkins Nylon string guitar so I decided to run a wanted advert in the Manchester Loot. A few days after the Ad appeared a chap rang up with one of these for sale, he described it as mint even down to the Brown/Tan pink lined case and stated that he was looking for £350 for it Wow! My heart skipped a beat. He told me that he lived in the Prestwich area of Manchester, I phoned a friend in Manchester and he said Prestwich was quite a nice area and there shouldn't be any problems buying something from around that area and said it was not like buying it from Leven.... (not that I know anything about Leven....) a few miles down the road.

Well we set off for Prestwich around 6pm and found the road that I had been given the address to, yes nice big detached houses, we drove up and down the road looking for this particular house but couldn't seem to find it. The house should be where the school was acording to the house numbers, oh well I'll give him a ring must have written it down wrong. The guy answered the phone and said due to the fact that it was nearly 9pm he had gone to work and had taken the guitar with him, but he would wait outside work and described where it was "The Flamming Balti" So I drove to the said place and sure enough there was an Indian gentleman standing on the pavement who approached the car as I pulled up, no guitar though! The guy said that he had left the guitar at his friends shop for safety, well the other half climbed in the back of the car and the gentleman climbed in, telling me to drive. Well, I drove around back streets and roads for about 25 minutes, all the time this guy was telling me what a nice religous person he was, finally he said the guitars here at the shop a large Bargain Booze type of place. I pulled outside the shop and said where are we, Leven.... was the reply. He then plonked his watch, wedding ring and mobile phone on the dashboard and said give me the £350 and I'll go in and fetch the guitar. Of course, alarm bells had rung about an hour before and I was well wound up and a bit scared as I was wondering how this would end.

Well I didn't give him the Money as I could see him running out of the door with it, so I started the car and drove up the road and had to remove him from the car, leaving him on the pavement with his bits and pieces. I drove off into the night, we called around at my friends house who sat laughing and asking where the Chet Atkins guitar was (he said i thought it was too good to be true). All a bit too close for comfort, if the guy had a knife or gun we would have been done for

A few years later I advertised for a Takamine guitar in the Loot, well thats another story...
Rob

[Didier]

A few months ago, I bought an item on eBay from an UK seller and payed through PayPal, but I never received it. Of course I sent messages to the seller to ask for delivery, he first answered with various apologies and promises, then stopped answering.
I complained to eBay, then to PayPal, and in the end I was paid back by PayPal.
It wasn't a very high bid (around £40).
Anyhow I wouldn't recommend buying items of high value on eBay, unless if you can see it and pick it yourself.

Didier

[Paul Creasey]

Too True, Didier!!
I use eBay quite a lot - though so-far only as a "Buyer" - and have had a couple of poor experiences that have been sorted by the PayPal "Buyer Protection" scheme.
When I first started using eBay - some years ago, now - someone said to me "Don't forget that eBay is nothing more than an electronic Car Boot Sale!"
I never DID forget that useful piece of advice, and remain quite amazed at the number of high-value transactions that seem to be completed. Whilst I'm sure that most of them are completed in a satisfactory manner, and in the "spirit" of eBay, the world remains a very uncertain environment where a measure of cynicism never goes amiss!
Regards
Paul