You can’t hear it too often: buyer, beware!

By Peter Vogel

After writing a recent series of columns on the trials and tribulations of cross-border eBay transactions I was overwhelmed with accounts of similar experiences.

More recently I wrote about a series of purchases that didn’t go smoothly. One involved a mistakenly described item (the seller subsequently made good). Another involved goods of dubious origin. A third involved an item that was shipped from North Vancouver two months after purchase only to be stolen (according to Canada Post) from my community mailbox.

Now I have another story, thanks to a colleague. Consider the following to be fair warning of an eBay scam that is very nasty indeed.

Bill Kingsland, Information Technology department head at Archbishop Carney Secondary School in Port Coquitlam, like many a good teacher on the lookout for money-saving deals in this day and age of tight education budgets, was using eBay to track down a piece of video editing equipment for his school.

After several days of online searching he was pleasantly surprised to finally locate the unit, with an excellent price to boot.

Fortunately Kingsland didn’t immediately jump at what could have been a very attractive transaction. At an initial glance the typical eBay check indicators looked reasonable: good feedback rating, not very high transaction numbers mind you; and a professional-looking product write-up.

Most strange though, and this is where my colleague made a breakthrough discovery, was that a click on “See seller’s other items” brought up a list several hundred long, but the seller had sold no more than a handful of items in recent months. Definitely out of the ordinary.

A mail exchange with the prospective seller raised another red flag. The seller wrote:

“Hi there!

“The Datavideo SE-800AV Digital Video Mixer is brand new and will be delivered in it’s (sic) original box. I will give you the receipt as well. It will have the warranty of 3 years. It comes with the manual (in English). I have bought it at a governmental auction for a very low price and I want to make some profit. If this work (sic) I intend to acquire more products for further sale.

“I have a contract with http://www.escrowseze.com/ a cyber escrow company (fees already covered). These (sic) is my assurance. The item is brand new with 3 full years warranty. You will have 30 days to test it and if anything is wrong you can get your money back. Also I’m looking for a long business relation and all what I sell is brand new and unused.

“The buy it now price is 1250 USD, and if you agree, please send me your full name and address in order for me to start the transaction and prepare shipping. You will send the payment to escrow company, they will tell me to send you the package and I will send it in your direction via UPS2day. It will reach your destination in 2-3 business days.

“The Escrow fees and shipping cost are on me.”

How generous indeed: escrow fees are on me! The problem is that the escrow company didn’t legally exist. It was probably nothing more than an extension of the seller’s wallet. How did Kingsland find that out, you ask? A quick check of the domain name registration for escrowseze.com (try www.netsol.com) showed it had been recently registered, frequently a tip-off that something is amiss.

Additional checking as this column is being written shows escrowseze.com being added Feb. 28 to one of many lists of shady escrow sites
(try http://escrow-fraud.pgardner.net).

What was Kingsland really looking at here? Suspicions aroused, he contacted eBay’s security department through e-mail. As noted in previous columns, eBay and its wholly-owned PayPal subsidiary can be notoriously slow to respond to consumer queries, but in this case the response came quickly:

“The recent e-mail sent from this (eBay) account was the result of an unauthorized account takeover. The password was guessed, or discovered, and then used to send e-mail like the message you received. We were not made aware of this activity until after the e-mail had been sent. We are now in the process of getting the account restored to its true owner.”

Wow! A compromised account. Something like a takeover of a shell company in the bad old days of the VSE. Instead of dealing with the apparent eBay account owner you now deal with a third party, who quickly adds a raft of non-existent products, along with a fake company to ostensibly take funds into escrow. Before you know it your wallet is lighter by a few hundred or possibly a few thousand dollars!

True to its word, eBay did shut down the takeover operation, but not a week later Kingsland discovered the same ruse operating from yet another seller’s account. Same product line, same listings (390 of them this time, everything from bicycles to laptops), same escrow service.

Buyer beware indeed. It seems that this scam is an easy one to perpetrate, so I wouldn’t be surprised to find several hundred were in operation at any given moment.

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Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via e-mail to peterv@portal.ca.