Buyer Beware: Online Auction Scams

It's very common and easy to buy products online these days. Services like eBay are used to buy and sell items over the Internet. EBay is an "Online marketplace enabling trade on a local, national, and international basis." as quoted from their website. Millions of items are traded each day on eBay. You'd think that the majority of these transactions would go smoothly, but that was not the case for me. Please note that I am not blaming eBay itself for my experience, but the fraudulent seller which will remain unnamed. You should still continue to trade via eBay as per usual, just be more careful. The fraudulent sellers business is no longer running on the eBay website to my knowledge. So, how did it all begin? Well, I, like most other women love to buy jewellery for myself. I did a search online for rings and came across the seller’s page on eBay. I absolutely fell in love with the look and the apparent quality of the rings. I read the information provided on the seller's page and they claimed that they were genuine (real gold) and worth up to $500 or so per item. I was so excited; I promptly joined eBay and started to bid for the items. The bidding started from zero, which is strange for something so expensive...But I figured that I'd be getting a bargain.

On the day I received the items in the post, to my dismay, I realised that they were not genuine, but fake jewellery that would only be worth up to $2 at most. Something you would find at the Reject Shop. I had paid way too much money to just let this slide. The images advertised were very misleading and deceptive. They looked like they were genuine in the photos published. But this was just a tactic of the seller to make more of a profit without delivering the actual product in the photo. I was shocked and disturbed that this is actually allowed to happen on eBay. I was new to it all and not very experienced. Even though I sent the items back immediately, the seller claimed that they had never received them. Luckily I had a tracking number to prove that I actually sent the package back. I had to escalate my dispute to a claim on eBay and provided all the proof that I was ripped off. For those of you that are not familiar with what “dispute” means on eBay, you open one to try and resolve your issues directly with a buyer or seller. It's uses include where a buyer fails to pay for an item, or an item is paid for and not received from the seller. If opening a dispute fails, you then escalate the dispute to a claim directly to eBay. EBay was going to reimburse me if the seller wouldn't have finally caved in. It took me months of e-mailing and harassing the seller to get my money back, and I usually don't like to resort to that sort of behaviour, but I had no choice.

Finally, I decided that if I won't get my money, that I will ruin their business reputation by leaving bad feedback. It didn't take long for them to e-mail me and complain (can you believe the nerve of this person?) about the negative feedback, and demanded that I remove it and stated that if I wanted my money I would not have to resort to that. But I felt, it was my last hope of achieving anything I wanted. We ended up making a deal, that if the seller refunds my money, I will remove my negative feedback. I had finally achieved my goal, and justice was served. I received the money in my PayPal account but decided I do not want to keep my end of the bargain, and left the negative feedback to warn others. It was my negotiation tactic and I do not believe the seller deserved to have the negative feedback removed, simply because it was so much of a hassle to get my refund for fake goods.

You'll be surprised to know that this seller had plenty of positive feedback, but in hindsight I question whether most of that feedback was actually from genuine buyers or also fake. Whenever you want to buy a product on eBay, you should always look for a seller's negative feedback and decide whether you still want to buy. I did not do this and I paid the price. I'm sure there are many more businesses like this operating online. I published this story to inform others so it does not happen to you. This article primarily focuses on jewellery sold online. It does not apply to everything, but you should still buy items online with caution. On that note, my last piece of advice on this topic is that you are better off buying jewellery from an actual jewellery shop because you can physically inspect the quality of the item. Don't rely on photographs on the Internet as evidence that the item is genuine.