I'm pretty certain I was scammed on Ebay...now what ?

December 2, 2009 2:31 PM

I've been scammed on ebay...now what ?

I bought an xbox 360 controller on ebay, it shipped from hong kong and it was 15.99 buy it now with free shipping. Before I get verbally whipped by you for doing this they had sold some eighty items and had a pretty positive score, and I know people that have bought stuff abroad and again had positive experience. The fine print said that it would take 20 or so days to come and that was fine. Today when I went to check on my eBay account, I saw that the user was no longer registered and now I don't know what to do, please help

More Info:
I payed with paypall and I'm willing to go as far as possible to get the controller or my money.

posted by carefulmonkey to Shopping (14 answers total)

The first (only?) steps are to contact eBay and PayPal; have you done so? PayPal was very helpful to me when I registered a complaint with them when I went through a similar situation.
posted by runningwithscissors at 2:32 PM on December 2, 2009 [1 favorite]

You should be covered under the buyer protection program. If you paid by credit card, you can call your credit card company and initiate a charge back, as well.
posted by procrastination at 2:36 PM on December 2, 2009

Best answer: This happened to me recently. If you're still in the 30-45 day window, eBay or Paypal may be able to help you. In my case I was too trusting and exchanged a few "oh, it totally left us on this date, maybe it's hung up in customs" emails, and after 30 days I was SOL.

Make sure you watch the bank account(s) that are linked to your Paypal account. After not receiving my item, I started seeing charges from 1-800 numbers I'd never heard of. Googling them turned up a bunch of hits to angry people demanding their money back. I ended up having to cancel and replace both my debit card and credit card.
posted by Flannery Culp at 2:41 PM on December 2, 2009 [1 favorite]

Best answer: If you paid with Paypal you're fine, your money is safe. Bear in mind though that members of eBay can be made "no longer registered" for a lot of things including late payment of a bill, he might be reinstated tomorrow so check back on his account and don't presume he has intentionally ripped you off. The controller may even be on its way to you already.

I believe you have 45 days to chargeback the money with Paypal, so sit tight for at least another week, watch his account, and try and contact the seller.
posted by fire&wings at 2:41 PM on December 2, 2009

Best answer: From what you've described, it's doesn't yet seem to be a given that you won't get your controller. The fact that the seller's account has been suspended or closed doesn't necessarily mean that you've been scammed. If they shipped other items they sold, they may have shipped yours as well. Wait for the specified amount of time to pass and then make a claim through paypal.
posted by anazgnos at 2:44 PM on December 2, 2009

Best answer: Definitely file a dispute with PayPal after 30 days. It will be pretty expedient since the user will most likely not respond, and so the case will be decided in your favor.

However, getting your money back is another matter... PayPal may not be able to recover your funds if the user has disappeared... they can return the balance pretty quickly if the user has not withdrawn it from their PayPal account, but if they have withdrawn it and they're gone, the chances go down. The fact that they are in another country complicates matters.

I had a similar occurrence recently regarding a $105 item that was never shipped. I contacted PayPal after 30 days and they promptly refunded me all of $2.51, with a promise that they would do whatever they could to get me the remaining balance. I knew they wouldn't be able to do anything... if they couldn't get it initially, they wouldn't be able to get it later, and it wasn't their $102.49 that was on the line anyway. Luckily I always fund my PayPal purchases with a credit card, so I was able to do a chargeback through Visa and get the full amount returned. I bet that gave PayPal more of an incentive to get the money back from the seller.

It's possible that PayPal has some additional protections in place since you bought the item from eBay. They may refund you the money whether they can recover it or not. My transaction was not from eBay so it may not be quite the same...

(All this possibly irrelevant information to say: If you do have your PayPal account funded by a credit card already, your last step should be a chargeback if you can't get it back through PayPal. If you don't already have PayPal funded by a credit card, do it so this doesn't happen again!)
posted by relucent at 2:50 PM on December 2, 2009

However, getting your money back is another matter... PayPal may not be able to recover your funds if the user has disappeared... they can return the balance pretty quickly if the user has not withdrawn it from their PayPal account, but if they have withdrawn it and they're gone, the chances go down. The fact that they are in another country complicates matters.

This is not true. Regardless of where the seller is and what he has in his account, they will take the money back, refund it to the buyer, and chase up the seller to bring his account balance into the black at a later date.
posted by fire&wings at 2:52 PM on December 2, 2009

FWIW, when I buy stuff from vendors in HK (namely dealxtreme), it's taken upwards of 45 days to receive the product. Have you tried contacting the seller?
posted by wongcorgi at 3:13 PM on December 2, 2009

Try contacting the seller, if you have an email.

This happened to me once and I still got my item. YMMV.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 3:50 PM on December 2, 2009

Yeah, have you contacted the seller directly -- it seems like a pretty bizarre scam to set up an ebay account with (fake?) positive reviews in order to scam one individual out of $15.
posted by modernnomad at 4:02 PM on December 2, 2009

Response by poster: I contacted the seller and told him to ship the game or give me my money back. Also when I bought my controller, they had already sold close to 100.
posted by carefulmonkey at 4:08 PM on December 2, 2009

I just sold something on ebay for the first time in years and I don't even get the money until the buyer leaves positive feedback or 21 days after the sale.
posted by thylacine at 4:11 PM on December 2, 2009

This happened to me a while ago. A day or so after I paid, the seller's account just disappeared. I was worried, and then a few days later the item arrived on my doorstep.
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 4:21 PM on December 2, 2009

Best answer: File a claim with paypal. If it arrives, you can always cancel the claim or re-send the payment. I would imagine you're far more likely to get a fake controller, given that it's coming from China, than to get ripped off, but who knows.
posted by Slinga at 4:41 PM on December 2, 2009