Quote:
Originally Posted by mental4astro
I doubt eBay can do much, or PayPal. These are smash and grab scams. The scumbag starts a new sellers account along with a PayPal account (probably with stollen credit card numbers). The new seller only has a few items for 'sale' at no starting price & for a very short run time, and people's greed takes over. The account is settled through PayPal, the seller takes the money & the seller account is abandoned, & PayPal is left footing the bill to return the buyer their money. This way a scammer can set up dozens of bogus accounts & are untouchable as the eBay & PayPal machine is too slow to react - the are just too big to move so quickly. The scammers know this & exploit it.
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All of this is probably true, except for the Paypal thing. Have you ever tried to get money out of Paypal? You need a validated bank account and credit card essentially. This is the small transaction they debit and credit you with. This means that they have a trail to what at least was at some stage a validated bank account, with a real person to tied it to. If the bank that has granted this account has done so without the necessary checks, that's where the responsibility should fall. I assume that Paypal simply put in a claim on the bank to reverse the transaction, the bank then tries to get the money back of the scammer, who has probably gone, so the bank wears the cost, perhaps this will encourage them to be more stringent with their security checks for bank accounts!
All up, it's a scam, it probably won't cost you anything, but you definitely won't get a cheap scope out of it. So is it worth the risk, definitely not as you will be risking your money for nothing.
Cheers
Stuart
