I received this message after bidding (unsuccessfully) on the Meacham & Co flute on ebay:
I am the eBay seller of Item numbe 110027802166.You expressed interest in my item by bidding, however the auction has ended with another eBay member as the high bidder. Because the winner of my auction didn’t respond to my emails after winning the auction, I want to issue a second chance offer to you. There are a lot of bidders who bid on the auction for fun and I hope you are serious buyer and we can make a clear deal. If you accept my second chance offer we will be eligible for eBay services associated with a transaction, such as fraud protection. To purchase my item please reply me.
P.S. If you are interested i will wait your reply asap.
Thank you!
hi trish, do you really think it’s a scam? I am not really that sure! The guy does seem to have good credentials, check out the feedback.
Should be easy enough to check. Email the seller at the address you know is valid and include the text from the suspect email. At worst, the seller and ebay will be made aware that someone is committig fraud.
The text does sound shady.
I know there are scams like this, but I bought a flute this way once. The seller, who I had contacted by email (through ebay) during the sale, emailed me because the first buyer couldn’t come up with the necessary cash for an “indeterminite” amount of time.
In my case, the seller and emailer was a Chiffer so it felt safe. Sometimes sales do fall through…but, in this case you can call or email the seller fairly easily to double check on the offer.
Eric
Well, I already emailed the original seller (Pat Olwell, I believe) but didn’t receive a reply yet…
Suggest you phone pat.
He doesn’t always check his
e mails. Worth getting straight
what’s going on.
thanks for advice everyone. I received another email seemingly from ebay making the offer again, but asking me to contact the seller direct on yet a different email address. I’ve reported it to ebay & waiting for their response. In the meantime I’ll ring Pat Olwell as you suggest, Jim. and see if I can find out what’s going on.
Well, just had a reply from ebay. It was a scam - it was a fake message and didn’t come from them. So the lesson is - take care! (by the way, the easy way to check was to log into ebay and go into the ‘my messages’ folder. If the message doesn’t appear there (mine didn’t) it hasn’t come from ebay.)
Glad you didn’t fall for it.
I rather thought the top bidder was serious
about that flute. My wife kept me chained
in the closet for the last
ten minutes of the auction.
Yes, I got that impression too! And very bad vibes about the scam emails, right from the start.
I bid on a computer on ebay a while back and got four, count 'em four, different scam offers that read almost exactly like what trish posted. Ebay confirmed all four as bogus - amazing!
Anyway, here are 2 red flags I identified from my experience: 1) Post-auction emailers whose messages aren’t written as well as the original item description (as you could tell from the description of the flute in question Patrick Olwell and his crew are well-educated people and good grammarians; trish’s emailer is not nearly as precise a writer – and in the case of my scammers? Well , to put it politely, I think English was the primary language for only one of them); and 2) the use of the word “deal.”
Those two things smack of scamdom in my book.
All of the reassurances that it wasn’t a scam and other emtional appeals were a big red flags to me
“serious bidder”–implies that you are wasting his time if you don’t take the offer. The scammer puts a lot of negative weight on someone not following through, to emotionally hook you into not being like them.
“fraud protection” to help you feel protected so you follow through with the scam.
It’s always best to check with the source (in this case, ebay) when you get unsolicited email telling you to do something (reset your PayPal data, bank data, buy something off of ebay) by typing the URL directly in the browser (www.ebay.com etc) and never click on a link in the email. Better safe than sorry.
wow, well done trish. I think I might have fallen for it. Thanks for the warning Trish.
Hi,
You must have missed the thread from last week. Been there, done that got the T-shirt!
http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?t=43440
Maybe our handlers can make a sticky?
Hello,
I go to work early in the morning otherwise I could have saved everyone a lot of hassle.
I am the high bidder on that flute and have already comunicated with Mr. Olwell. It should be here by Friday. There were two bidders for the same amount but mine was in first, it was that close.
I was waiting to get the flute before posting anything about it.
Good luck to all and be careful.
Kurt
Official Ebay communications will have your full name (not Ebay user name). They will also be on your “my Ebay” page. If it is not there, it is almost certainly a scam.
The ones asking for password verification almost arrive early in the morning or late at night, when people are not thinking that clearly. Ebay and Paypal really need to go to a photo icon site verification like many banks have. The gist is that each user selects an image icon from thousands and that image icon will appear whenever they are on a real screen from the bank. It would require less overhead than the Chiff icons (not much).
Create a bogus email address (ie: Hotmail… costs you nothing) and reply to the offer, dragging it out for WEEKS and many, many emails. Make up numerous excuses why you can’t send the money immediately (my favorite is that I belong to a religious cult which prohibits owning a bank account…all funds must come through the church). Personally, I find torturing these scum a highly entertaining pasttime. One anti-scam sniper actually got the scammer to send money so he could cover the cost of admitting the scammer into the “Church of Bob Dobson”, since his religion prohibited financial transactions outside of his faith. He also made the scammer sign a statement of membership (which was worded in a ludicrous manner, making statements which would have any sane person screaming for the door in an instant) and submit a photo of themselves with a fish on their head (I’m not making this up). If you have doubts, see 419eater.com.
Dave
Dave, it cannot be true…that’s too much fun
I love it!
Oh my God… What a story!
http://www.419eater.com/html/okorie.htm
Congratulations, Kurt! It’s a beauty.