Nigerian Fraudsters ’Own’ eBay And PayPal

Last week I listed a black iPhone 4S (16GB) on eBay that was surplus to my requirements and much to my surprise it sold within about 40 seconds.

Within a couple hours I received 6 different emails that appeared to come from eBay and PayPal confirming that the payment had been made by the ’buyer’.

But upon closer inspection I realised that no payment had been made into my PayPal account. In fact, the ’buyer’ had also emailed me to tell me that the phone was a gift "for someone close to her heart" and so after checking the originating IP address for that email I realised that the buyer wasn’t really in the UK as claimed, but was in Nigeria.

I reported the transaction to eBay and sent the "spoof" emails to them for their ’investigation’ but I got the feeling when I spoke to their customer support operator that there really wasn’t anything they could do to prevent this type of fraud.

They suggested that I set the buyer requirements so that the eBay user would have to also have a PayPal account connected to their eBay account in order to bid or purchase my re-listed item and after acting on all of their advice I re-listed the item.

1 minute later, the iPhone sold again. This time to another "0" rated fraudster.

Once again, I spoke again to eBay and they suggested that I block the user from buying. Somehow this didn’t fill me with confidence, but I complied and added both the first and second fraudster to my now growing ’blocked user’ list.

I re-listed the item and 40 seconds later it sold again. Another fraudster. Obviously these Nigerians are operating an automated script that crawls eBay looking for high ticket items.

So I reported the user, blocked the user and re-listed the item again.

In the interim I had to get the limit on my account increased because the items I was ’selling’ hadn’t been paid for... but eBay gave me a special code and increased my limit so I could owe them more money. Nice of them, eh?

I listed the iPhone again and once again within 1 minute it sold to another "0" rated fraudster from Nigeria.

It’s clear to me that these Nigerian fraudsters own eBay and PayPal. Each time I received bogus emails that appeared to come from PayPal, confirmed by emails that appeared to come from eBay to confirm that payment was received. But no payment was received.

eBay appears unwilling to do anything to prevent what is clearly a problem with their system. From my perspective these fraudsters own eBay and PayPal.

When I spoke to eBay the last time, before they informed me that I could not re-list the item because I now had ’sold’ 6 items that had not been paid for... I asked why they simply didn’t compare the IP address of the person making the purchase with the country declared when the account was registered, but this bit of logic was dismissed as impossible.

Really?

http://www.wirenews.co/op-ed/global/4632/nigerian-fraudsters-own-ebay-and-paypal