My old phone

It started out well enough. I bought a new iPhone and put my old phone and accessories up for sale on eBay. As is often the case, bidding was slow until the last few minutes of the auction. At the very last second someone swooped in and won the auction, bidding more than I was hoping to get. (Warning #1)

When I went to look at who the winner was, their location was listed as Nigeria. (Warning #2) Nigeria is famous as a source of internet scams. A Nigerian bid was also outside of the terms of my auction which was restricted to US bidders only (Warning #3).

I decided to play things out a bit and I sent them an email asking if they had a US address to send to. (I'd had three warnings already, but I still didn't get that I was being scammed.)

Several hours after the end of the eBay auction, I got an email from eBay stating that the auction had been invalidated due to fraud. (Warning #4) I finally started to get that things were smelling rotten.

This morning, I got another email from eBay saying that they had made an error and that the auction had been reinstated. I was to promptly send my items to the Nigerian address and then I would receive payment. My fraud antenna was up now, and I noticed many problems with this email. It had all the hallmarks of a fake email, most obviously was the bad syntax in which it was written. Also, they had things backwards: with eBay, you receive payment, THEN you send the merchandise, not the other way around. It was a good fake, nevertheless.

I thought things were done at that point and if I just ignored the email from eBay, that all would be ok. But this afternoon I received and email from PayPal stating that the money from the auction had been deposited into my account. Hmmm, I thought. And strange. They not only deposited the $56 for the auction but an additional $50 for shipping (Warning #5).

I went to my PayPal account, and surprise, there had been no deposit. I went back and read the PayPal email again and there was fine print stating that the deposit was being held until I sent the merchandise. Again, backwards from the way eBay auctions and PayPal payments work. So what I had was a second very good fake email in one day.

The moral of this long story? All I did was a small little auction for a cell phone. But somebody (Nigerian or not, who knows) has really tried hard to con me out of my phone. I am pretty aware of internet scams, but if I had not been paying close attention, I'm sure that I would have fallen for it at some point. eBay and PayPal both go to great efforts do be safe places to do business, but there are also scammers out there who try to trick you with fake emails that look very real.

Both eBay and PayPal have extensive resources on their sites to help you learn more about the different kinds of auction fraud. I'd give links, but you need to be logged into their sites first before you can get to those pages.

I did learn one useful thing in all this that could have clued me in sooner to what is going on. eBay has a Message Center now. Every email they send to you also goes into the Message Center. One quick look there and I could see immediately that the fake emails I was getter weren't there.

Related Items: Phishing | eBay