I have sold a Lens for a friend on eBay recently. It went for £450.

The buyer has a PayPal account linked to his eBay account with an address in the US, but the buyer wants it shipping to somewhere in Vietnam. Now this sounds very very dodgy to me, I have rung eBay and they just told me to confirm the address with the seller and then send with a tracking number.

Has anybody got any suggestions to how I can check this out before I send anything halfway around the world?

Cheers

Cris.

Don't do it, you are about to get scammed.

With PayPal I would never send anything valuable outside UK any more, possibly US/Aus/NZ if I used a reputable courier.

I sent something reasonably valuable to the US by Airsure, buyer claimed it wasn't received and I didn't have a signature (UK > US post has no signature option), so I was scammed. In your case all that needs to happen is that for whaetver reason you don't have a signature (flakey post/courier) and you lose the lot.

I am just about to sell a camera body and lens on eBay and don't plan to offer it to anybody outside the UK, I think there is a decent enough market here that the bidding will be good enough. Shipping will be by Special Delivery only, or cash on collection (no PayPal before collection).

Just a little bit more info, the excuse given is that it's a present for his brother. I have tried to ring the telephone number on the PayPal account and the person does not accept calls from non-callerID numbers, which mine is of course (being international).

I have searched online for the name and telephone number on google and that has brought up the AT&T listing also confirming the US address as being correct. One thing is for certain I am not sending anything until I have spoken to an American sounding voice on the end of that number!

Cheers

Cris.

Sounds very dodgy, I'd tell the buyer that you're only prepared to ship to the account address and put the onus on them to prove their bonafide.
The problem that you have with an international sale is that the force of law is week to non-existant: If you're not happy, don't ship. The buyer could say that he's accepted a contractual arrangement with you, but between the UK, the US and Vietnam, he's going to have trouble pursuing litigation.
At £450 it's worth him making arrangements, if it's dodgy he'll disappear!

It still sounds like a scam, I would say ship it to him by a signed-for courier and let him take the risk of shipping to Vietnam when it's his property to be lost/stolen. I will underline this do not ship by anything except a courier which takes a signature on delivery, PayPal only accept this in disputes.

It sounds like a scam to me too.

He has paid me a total of £500, and that is currently in my PayPal account. I charged him £50 for shipping via FedEx to Vietnam with extra insurance. I am thinking this is a hacked eBay and PayPal account or something and the guy in the US has no idea and will issue a chargeback as soon as he finds out. Leaving me with a lens half way around the world and down £500.

I have told him I need to verify the sale over the phone, and I want to speak to him on the number on the PayPal account first. Lets see how far he runs away from this now....

Cheers

Cris.

Does the buyer have a good reputation? And not just a hundred or so reviews, like multiple hundred?

I just don't do anything on ebay anymore because of crap like this.

No, the buyer was a new buyer and only had 1 other feedback. For another lens in fact.

I have refunded the PayPal, and issued a cancel transaction request after the buyer was only able to supply me with a number in Vietnam and at that point I thought this is 100% a scam.

It was a pretty rubbish scam I have to say, there was little effort to hide the fact. I wonder what percentage of people actually get ripped off like this?

Cheers

Cris.

Is that the easiest way for these guys to steal money from compromised PayPal accounts? I mean, it still leaves a very obvious trail back to their real address. Though I suppose they can have it shipped to a random address and then simply wait outside that house for the UPS truck or what have you.

I guess they must play off the fact that the police in Vietnam won't be interested in a few people from outside their country getting taken for a ride for £450. I would have been the one loosing out as PayPal would have credited the compromised account as I shipped to a unconfirmed account and I would then be missing a lens.

I have relisted the item now, but will only ship to certain countries and need immediate payment with PayPal to complete the transaction. This is the first issue I have ever had with Selling on eBay in all the years I have been on there. I have found most people to be very honest, where ever they are in the world. I posted a set of headphones to Bulgaria today, I am confident that will go ok as everything checks out.

Cheers

Cris.

In my business I've sold and shipped all over the place, including Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, China, Singapore, Malaysia, India, UAE, Oman, Serbia among others that you might also hear some scams coming from.

It seems like in your case the con wasn't very sophisticated and in fact pretty easy to deal with. You likely did the best thing by simply canceling the payment. I've also read of too many PayPal horror stories - their service as a middle-man doesn't make the selling/security process any easier let me tell you.

I'm confused as to why this was identified as a scam. What was the suspicious aspect of the transaction?

Didn't he say he had the paypal money already? If you've got the paypal money received, and someone expects an item in return for that money, how does that mean that someone is scamming you?

Is the only suspicious factor in this transaction the geographical location of the shipping address?

Hi! I'd like to buy your high value item. I'm in the US and so is my payment details but I'm buying this for my brother in another country as a present. Can you ship it direct to them? I don't have any US contact details available but you can call my brother in this other country. Thanks!

A paypal dispute will take the funds back.

Gotcha. Understood.

Yea, it wasn't exactly the biggest scam. Pretty easy to spot and avoid in the end.

It seems like a lot of trouble at quite a high risk though. It has taught me to be very careful in future and double check everything.

eBay and PayPal are rubbish in this situation too, they almost make it easy for them to at least try and scam people. I can't find a way to report this account as hacked, or at least as suspicious. All I can do is raise a case against my sale and wait about 8 days.

Cheers

Cris.

Generally the policies of eBay and Paypal are heavily biased in favour of the buyer. They want to encourage people to buy and to make it a "safe" environment for them to do so. The buyer can turn around and say that you never shipped them the item and Paypal will refund them the money with next to no questions asked. It will be your onus to prove that the item was sent, was correctly shipped and that they actually signed for it. Unless its an exceptionally high value item, you'll waste more time in paperwork and gathering evidence that its easier and cheaper to write it off.

This is one of the reasons why a lot of people I know that used to sell on eBay have given up on it. They were getting regularly scammed and eBay + Paypal wouldn't do a thing. It is too easy to create another account and continue scamming.

The way to make up for any such losses in with high volumes (I wish I was selling enough volume where it didn't matter). The eBay high-rollers haven't given up on eBay despite a percentage of their sales getting chargebacks. It's part of doing business. When you're making 100k or a couple of million you don't really care about a dozen chargebacks every couple of months. That is, as long as your business isn't high-priced items but that would likely be low volume then). Once you get higher in volume you also get more cred with eBay and PayPal.

The bottom line is that they're actually out to protect themselves first and foremost. They will not lose money. Next is the buyer and then the seller. The seller gets protected pretty much only when it's a really obvious scam. And even then sometimes this protection still leaves the seller at a loss, due to rule #1, protect eBay and PayPal.

I've been shafted by PayPal a number of times which had nothing to do with a bad or scammy customer. It was just PayPal BS. Thankfully I've often been able to get repaid at a later date by the customer specifically because they weren't scammers.

The biggest scam is Ebay will still charge you for the auction. I put in my listing I would only ship to the USA and would only take Paypal. (yeah I know everyone hate paypal now) So some guy buys it want me to ship internationally and wants to do a wire transfer. So I had to relist the item and ebay still charged me for the first auction.

Here's an important warning about PayPal.

You cannot issue a refund/cancellation of payment for a currency for which you do not hold a balance.

Let me set up the example to show why this is problematic (and a rip-off):

I keep only a US dollar balance. I had the payment receiving prefs set to allow payments in other currency with automatic conversion. That was the default and it's what I assumed would be the right way to run the payment side of my business if I'm charging US dollars to a world-wide audience.

Tonight I received a non-cart payment in Euros and it was automatically converted (buying Euros from me) to US. My net was let's say US$217 (or e158) on a payment of e164 with PayPal taking a 6.something Euro fee.

However this was part of a transaction I wanted to offer the buyer a discount on so I needed to credit them back some money. To make everything easier (so I thought) I decided to try and cancel the transaction. There's no CANCEL or DENY button, only a REFUND. So I pressed it and refunded the full amount.

I notice that nothing came off my total balance. I expected the transaction to be recalculated at the same rate and be sent back to him since this was a refund, not a new transaction.

Instead what I see is that PayPal is putting through a charge to my BANK ACCOUNT which is also in US dollars. They have calculated a new exchange (selling me Euros) which will take US$228 from my bank account to cover the e158.

Notice the problem there? With PayPal double dipping. It's a completely new transaction so they're covering the spread on the other end, selling to me rather than buying. Of course the whole issue is that they're not simply canceling the original payment.

The girl on the phone tells me they cannot cancel the transaction to my bank account once it's initiated. WTF? It's only supposed to clear Feb 1 and it can't be cancelled?

I've now set up my PayPal account to not receive any payments in currencies I don't hold. I'm hoping this isn't going to cause an issue for buyers and that any necessary conversions will happen on their end when they try to buy US dollar products from me.

On top of everything I may get the worst shaft of all, which is that my bank account is likely to be suspended in my PayPal account. That's because I'm next to positive that my bank account will not allow debit transactions from PayPal. The best I could get the girl on the phone to do was write a note on the account that said the payment was likely to be denied and to not suspend the account. With that account suspended I have no way to transfer out money without converting it to Canadian at PayPal's shit rates.

The best rates are from the dude in the back room at the Taiwanese drug store. Trust me on this.

Another gotcha, in the UK at least, is that you can't make a quick cancellation of a transaction if you have no funds.

If you make a purchase using PayPal, they are happy to take the funds very quickly from your bank account and make the payment to the other party straight away. If however something goes wrong with say and ebay auction and you need to refund the buyer you can only do it immediately if you have funds in the account.

If you don't have funds then you have to wait until they do a very slow, week long, transfer from your bank.

When I had this happen to me the buyer, reasonably expectedly, got pissed after a couple of days of no refund. I then instead had to pay them the money with a new PayPal transaction (which could of course happen immediately) and lost my chance to get a refund on my PayPal fees for the original transaction.