Russell Beattie

I've been trying to sell my Xbox 360 on eBay for a while now... The first time I tried was a couple months ago, and after the auction ended, it turned out that the winner's account had been stolen. It was pretty obvious I was being scammed as I got a fake PayPal email that said the payment was "pending" and would be available when the packaged was shipped - to Nigeria. At first I wasn't sure if it was someone who was just scraping the finished auctions, but the email had private information in it (like the winner's PayPal registered shipping address) and after a day or so it was obvious I wasn't getting any money from a real person. It took a couple days for eBay to confirm it, but when they did, they just *completely erased* the entire transaction. I hadn't made a copy of my auction which had a big list of all the peripherals and games and stuff, so I just completely lost all that work. What was even better was that eBay took another month to figure out it needed to credit my account for the non-auction.

After losing a week last time, I wasn't particularly excited about going through the process again, so the 360 and gear have sat in a box since then ready to be sold. I finally got around to listing it again on Sunday (rent is due in 7 days) and guess what? IT HAPPENED AGAIN! I had the auction set so that only registered PayPal users can bid, but yet another PayPal account was stolen (along with their eBay ID and transactions dating back to 2002) and the thieves happily outbid everyone else, and just sent me another fake PayPal notice with this at the bottom:

Important Note: This payment will remain 'Unclear' until the shipment reference/ tracking number is send to us for shipment verification so as to secure this transaction. For security reason, we are now verifying shipment of item purchased before processing of funds into your account. The funds have cleared from the sender's account and Approved, but will not be authorize until we get the following information from you. Send tracking number with item number, seller and buyer eBay ID to our customer care trackandtraceshipment@accountant.com and our representative will attend to you. You will be notified by email when the funds have cleared into your Pay Pal balance after we verified the shipment information.

*Do not send tracking information directly to the buyer in other to be cover under Pay Pal Sellers Protection Policy

WTF? Twice!? I'm sorry, I'm just not attributing this to bad luck. eBay must be just insanely over-run with scammers at this point. I mean, they've always had problems, but now it looks like it's just out of fucking control. This sort of thing drives me crazy for some reason. It's not just the time and effort wasted, it's the insult of the thing as well.

Grrrrr.

-Russ