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Buyer’s Fraud: Avoid Being a Victim
by Jeff Cohen
From everything you’ve heard about the risk
of fraud on eBay, you might think it’s only buyers getting
scammed – but you couldn’t be more wrong. Here are a few common
scams that sellers fall for every day.
The
Rubber Check
This one obviously isn’t limited to eBay – it’s been going
on for years in all kinds of business. It works like this:
a buyer sends you a check that they don’t have the funds to
cover and you pay it in your bank. You then send the goods
right away, only to find out a few days later that the check
bounced.
The solution to this is simple: don’t send anything to a buyer
until their payment has cleared, no matter how quickly they
might say they need it. Advise them to pay electronically if
they don’t want to wait so long for their items. Then again,
if your items are quite small, you could just take the loss
from an occasional bounced check. Think of it as a small price
to pay for faster and better customer service.
‘I Never Bought Anything!’
This is one of the riskiest scams to fall victim to. In this
case, the credit card’s real owner still has control over it
– no-one has stolen their details. They have realised, however,
that they can phone up the bank who issued their card to say
that it’s being used fraudulently and they never bought any
such thing, and the bank will often reverse the transaction
without even investigating. The only way to beat this scam
is to make all your sales through eBay, as they keep a record
of transactions.
The
Unconfirmed Address
It is quite easy to steal PayPal accounts from inexperienced
users: all you need, after all, is their email address and
password. PayPal tries to protect against credit cards registered
on stolen accounts being used to buy things by listing a ‘confirmed
address’ for each buyer – an address that matches what is registered
with their credit card issuer.
What many scammers will do is ask you to ship to a different
address – unless you’re very sure of them, this is a bad idea,
as they could be trying to commit credit card fraud. Be especially
suspicious of anyone who wants to pay a higher price and get
overnight shipping, especially if not even to the same country
as the confirmed address. The fraudster is trying to make sure
the item reaches them before they are discovered.
It’s up to you to take responsibility for fraud on PayPal,
as eBay’s favourite way to refund fraudulent payments to their
rightful owner is to just reverse it from you! This is considered
an occupational risk of PayPal usage, and sellers who get burned
severely sometimes go as far as moving to a rival electronic
payment service. See www.nopaypal.com for more.
# # # # # SolveYourProblem.com : 2007
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