The Great Ebay Scam

I have nearly been the victim of a horrible eBay scam. I had put a mobile phone up for auction and it came to an end last night. And it went for more than I was expecting. Yippee I said. But then I looked at who had bought it. They had only 2 feedback. One positive from years ago and a recent negative one. Ok. They were also American which is odd as I had stated UK buyers only.

So anyway I invoice them and I get an email this morning from 'Paypal'. This basically said the buyer (though the name of buyer they gave was different from the eBay name?) had paid me using Paypal. (Though they had apparently paid £80 more than they should have. And the shipping address was for Nigeria!) Then the email said that as a security measure the money would not be transferred to my Paypal account until I had posted the item and emailed them the delivery code. This is where I got really concerned. I had never seen this before on Paypal.

So I go onto my Paypal account and there was no mention of me being/going to be paid anything. Then I looked at the email again. I had read that the email was sent from a paypal email address. But when I looked at it again I realised it was actually sent by some random email address and whoever had registered it had used the Paypal email as their name. Hence why it came up. The email looked rather convincing with all the Paypal graphics etc. But was definitely a phishing email. I sent a copy of the email to Paypal who also confirmed it was fake.

So before all this I had got a rather confusing email from eBay saying they had removed my item listing. I didn't really get why. But then when I read it later I made more sense of it. Apparently whoever bought my phone did so using someone elses eBay account. So eBay had removed the item so as I couldn't get negative feedback etc. They knew nothing about the Paypal scam nor did they advise me not to go ahead with the transaction. Had to use my own wit to work that one out!

So there we go. Feel a little disappointed. I've used eBay for a while now and have never had any problems. Was interesting to see just how convincing these people can be. If I hadn't already been familiar with Paypal I probably would have been scammed out of a mobile phone. The moral of the story? Never trust emails from these companies. Cause they may not be from these companies. Any emails from eBay are also sent to your eBay account inbox so you can trust what it says there. And never post an item unless you actually have control of the money. No matter what an email from 'Paypal' might say.

So what else is fun. Well HMS Bounty (aka The Black Pearl!!!) is currently docked in Derry! Look. How cool is that! I quite fancy going for a wee look some time.

Got my tickets to see Duke Special today. Still not sure how I got these. I had tried to get tickets a couple weeks ago but every night was sold out. Then out of boredom I tried again a few days ago and it worked. Yippee. I've never seen him in the Empire so its quite exciting.