Making money on eBay is nice but you may find lot of eBay scams. You should keep an eye when you are buying and selling on eBay. There are some most common and popular fraudulent ways that could lead to major scams on eBay. No matter whether you are a casual or professional buyer or seller, you should learn about such scams. You need to take preventive measures to identify and avoid happening with you.
Recommended: Read our previous article on How to create and mange your store front on eBay
Wholesale List Scam
Wholesale list scam is all about taking advantage of giving fine prints on the auction. Lot of people dealing with eBay fails to read fine prints on an auction. Typically this scam targets people who buy electronic or technical products on eBay. It looks like seller is offering great deal on particular product. For example, the product which has market price of $150 is price at $40 on eBay. When the customer purchase that product finds wholesale price list of that particular product and not physical product. This happens because they fail to read fine print mentioning that they will get on the product list and not actual product. In such cases, you need to be little rational when you find bigger price difference. Hence read the auction carefully.
Bid Shielding
This scam has concern with sellers on eBay. This scam usually happens by bidders having two eBay accounts. The scams happen like this. You put your product worth $150 for auction on eBay. You do not have any reserve. The scammer uses his first eBay account and bids $10 for your product. Just after that the same scammer uses second eBay account and bids $300 for your product. But your product is worth $150. Finding two bids with such a big difference no other potential bidder will bid on your product till your auction get time up. At last moment, bidder with $10 will comes back and wins the bid effectively shielding all other potential bidder. Hence to avoid such situation you should reserve your auction and put some disclaimer on your auction. The disclaimer should clearly mention that if you suspect bid shielding then you reserve right to withdraw the auction.
Bad Check Scam
This is very common scam. When the buyer purchase any product gives bad check as a part of payment. You dispatch the product and you find that after couple of weeks the check is bounced. You will lose your product and payment both. Hence, do not accept check payment or if you accept the check then do not dispatch the product unless you release your actual payment
Spoof eBay Emails
This is all about attempting to get your personal information or eBay account information. Scammer fires an email as if it is sent by eBay. The mail asks you to verify your account information. If you reply such emails with your private information, you may face chances of theft identity. To avoid this scam, you should verify the header of the email. Typically, email fired by eBay will have ebay.com in the part of email id. If you find anything suspicious you can forward such emails to ebay.com for authentication.
To summarize, often people assume that people on eBay are honest but sometime they may experience some unfortunate happening. You just require being careful and thinking twice as a necessary precaution. Do not anything scare you off, just be careful. Keep yourself armed with different fraud preventing it happening with you.
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