Valhalla Island

During the week long sale of my HP iPaq someone tried to scam me. Although eBay did send me a warning as soon as I was contacted by them, I admittedly ignored it. Being the diligent internet user I am it was easy to tell the moment I was trying to be scammed but to a less experienced user (that doesn’t read eBay alerts) it would be quite easy to fall for. For that reason, I’ll document my experience.

It started with an official question on the item asking if he can quickly finalise the purchase outside of eBay as he works on the sea and is consistently in and out. He’d like to send it to his son overseas before his birthday. He was offering $400, well over what I was expecting to make. He provided an @yahoo.com email address for me to get in contact.

I replied telling him to simply bid $400 on the item, it ended in two days, I would send it wherever he wanted when the auction finished. If there hadn’t already been a bid on the PDA I would have added a buy it now price of $400 and told him to use that.

He replied saying it was unacceptable, that he needed it now. He wanted to pay through PayPal and he provided an address the item would be shipped to. A Nigerian address. We all know how notorious Nigeria is for internet scams, I guess Nigerian’s don’t know yet. While it was all very suss I knew that as long as I received the money in PayPal, everything would be fine and I could safely send it off. I’d have the money, he’d have the PDA.

So I sent him a PayPal pay request, with $100 added for shipping to Nigeria. I emailed, told him why I added the $100 and told him I’d need the money in PayPal before I shipped the item of cancelled the eBay item. I went to bed.

In the morning there was an email from him saying the money was in a “reputable escrow service - PayPal”. PayPal is not an escrow service. There was also an email from “PayPal” confirming the payment. I logged into PayPal, no money had been paid, the email from “PayPal” was a fake.

I emailed back calling him a scumbag, reported him to eBay and published his email address - neill1987@yahoo.com.

Do not do business outside of eBay. It’s almost impossible to get scammed if you keep within the mighty walls of eBay. Besides, it’s unethical to sell something outside of eBay once it’s on eBay, I just couldn’t pass up $400. And finally, remember that getting the money is the most important thing, logging in to Paypal is the only reliable way to check.