[HN Gopher] Update on the eBay Scam
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Update on the eBay Scam
Author : speckx
Score : 27 points
Date : 2026-04-03 18:22 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kevquirk.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kevquirk.com)
| petra303 wrote:
| This is the reason I stopped selling on eBay. Zero protection for
| the seller.
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| As an ethical buyer, it's incredible... but I'll be damned if I
| ever take the risk of selling anything on eBay.
| elevation wrote:
| eBay's buyer protections are eroding as well.
|
| I bought a phone on eBay last month. The seller insured it with
| USPS. When the phone arrived with a cracked screen (the listing
| had photos of a not-cracked screen) I photographed the damage
| and submitted a return request with eBay. The seller then filed
| an insurance claim with USPS.
|
| USPS sent me a letter, requiring me to present the damaged
| package (and its contents) to my local postmaster. I documented
| this to the seller via eBay, but complied with the government
| authority -- I didn't want the seller to lose his insurance
| claim because I didn't comply. The postmaster kept the package,
| saying it was a requirement.
|
| Once the phone was out of my hands, the seller denied the
| return, keeping my money, while presumably keeping the money
| from the USPS insurance claim.
|
| I have no recourse with eBay.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| I've come to the conclusion that anything under about $500
| isn't worth trying to sell online anymore. eBay has eroded as a
| marketplace for sellers.
|
| For anything higher value, I have hobbyist forums I have 20
| year memberships on where I can spend the time to due diligence
| individual buyers and transactions thoroughly. Even here I
| often don't get maximum dollars as I may have 3 offers and go
| with the person I am most comfortable transacting with.
|
| And even on the higher end, it's easier to just do a trade in
| at a retailer instead of trying to extract maximum value doing
| business online.
|
| On the lower end the problem is it's not worth the time to do
| the due diligence, and there are a tremendous number of time
| wasting tire kickers for lower value items. So I end up giving
| stuff away or just holding on to it, which is a shame.
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| I've gotten comfortable with selling things very cheap on
| Craigslist.
|
| E.g. a $300 recliner I'd sell for $25 because no one will
| give you hassle about it, and at that price, you can pick
| from several buyers the one that is least likely to be a
| headache.
| pton_xd wrote:
| > anything under about $500 isn't worth trying to sell online
| anymore
|
| Anything under say $100 I'm fine selling on ebay because a)
| it's less likely to be scammed and b) even if it is, I don't
| care that much. Anything over that amount is only being sold
| in person on fb marketplace. Or, like you said, on a hobbyist
| forum.
|
| I agree that ebay has completely eroded for sellers. It's
| basically a ship and be pleasantly surprised later situation.
| x0x0 wrote:
| ebay seems to scam buyers too.
|
| I was looking for a phone. Lots of sellers will list things as
| brand new which should imply new in box (unopened packaging).
| After you carefully read the listing, they actually mean open
| box which is far more variable.
|
| Ebay does not care at all. It makes the search basically
| useless.
| nfriedly wrote:
| I keep getting packages in the mail that are addressed to me, but
| not things I ordered. Lawnmower parts, plumbing hardware, a grill
| cover, a magnetron (!), etc.
|
| One had an amazon slip in it, but most of them have come through
| ebay. I reported the one to amazon and the rest to ebay (I gave
| them the USPS tracking numbers since I didn't know the order
| numbers), and also contacted a couple of the sellers who were
| businesses with public contact info. The sellers I reached both
| said they would send me return labels, but neither has yet.
|
| I feel like this has to be a scam, but I'm not sure exactly what
| the scam is. Maybe someone's writing fake reviews, but making
| real orders to match?
| ribosometronome wrote:
| That does sound like brushing, https://www.uspis.gov/news/scam-
| article/brushing-scam, which is effectively what you describe:
| >Maybe someone's writing fake reviews, but making real orders
| to match
| nfriedly wrote:
| Man, that seems wasteful.
|
| I opened all of the packages already, so it's too late to
| send them back. (I get enough things in the mail that I _did_
| order, that I pretty much have to open it to know it 's
| something I didn't order.)
| tsss wrote:
| Man, I'd like to get a magnetron for free.
| nfriedly wrote:
| Send me a shipping label. (I'm only half-joking. I told the
| original seller I'd send it back to them, so I feel like I
| ought to give them at least a week or two to get me the label
| they said they'd send. But, seriously, email me in a month,
| and if I still haven't heard back from the seller, I'll send
| it to you.)
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Out of curiosity, based on a comment I read on HN the other
| day, I fed your profile notes into Claude and asked it to
| tell me your email address. It had no problem. I guess the
| days of obfuscating email addresses that way to foil
| scrapers is behind us.
| nfriedly wrote:
| Yeah, but it takes a heck of a lot more compute to to run
| an llm than a regex. So I think there's still some value
| in obfuscation.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| That is a fair observation, especially since my default
| Claude model is Opus 4.6, which is about as far away from
| efficient as you can get. I don't have any recent models
| downloaded on my MBP, but maybe this evening I'll try it
| again and see how that goes -- especially the smaller
| lightweight models.
| cm11 wrote:
| I hadn't heard of brushing, but you might also be a bystander
| for a different common eBay scam. Seller sells to Buyer, but
| ships something different to another address with the same zip
| code. I think eBay may have since fixed part of this, but the
| deal was that all the tracking info would show that the seller
| shipped and delivered something of the right approximate weight
| to the buyer (because USPS would only share/confirm info
| accurate to zip code level).
|
| The thing that makes it less likely is that the buyer and
| seller had multiple transactions together which is uncommon for
| eBay. And also if the stuff you got was expensive. Maybe buyer
| really just put the wrong address and neither side can do much
| to get the item back once delivered?
| ryandrake wrote:
| I got hit with that exact scam recently as a buyer, and I can
| tell you eBay has not figured out how to mitigate it yet. I
| purchased an expensive item from the seller. He sent some
| token thing to a different address in my city in the same zip
| code and provided me (and eBay) the tracking info. Item was
| delivered, and all eBay knows is "item sent to zip code X was
| delivered" so it was marked as delivered. I submitted a
| dispute, which was pretty much instantly closed with "Seller
| provided proof of delivery." I contacted UPS who happily
| provided me the actual address the package was delivered to.
| I escalated through eBay's support channel and offered to
| prove that the delivery was not to my address but they didn't
| care or want to know the actual delivery address. Finally,
| after a few days, eBay got back to me with a form letter
| saying I would be refunded because the seller's item was
| "lost in the mail," which was total bullshit, but at this
| point I didn't care since I got my money back, but the
| scammer probably kept the money too, so I guess eBay is
| eating these costs.
| burningChrome wrote:
| On ebay people will create fake purchases in order to get a
| 100% rating and then scam people since people are being far
| more judicial about who they're buying from.
|
| Just a recent example I had.
|
| I was looking for a new camera. Finally settled in on a Fuji
| X-T3. The prices on legit camera places like B&H, Andorama and
| MPB were running around $800 for an excellent condition body.
| It went down from there in price. Found a body on ebay for
| $790. Right price, albeit a bit less and for a silver body.
| There has been an increase in demand for the silver body since
| Fuji announced they will no longer make them. Most silver
| bodies have been pushed up over $800 for even a decent
| condition body.
|
| After kind of going back and forth over whether I wanted to
| make the purchase, the seller messaged me with an offer of
| $750. I was leaning on purchasing, but just as an experiment, I
| sent Claude the link to the auction and asked if it saw any red
| flags.
|
| Claude pointed out it was a fairly new account within the last
| few months. Yes, it had 100% seller rating, but they only had
| six sales with zero user feedback. They also were not accepting
| returns. For a $700+ purchase, this was too many red flags and
| I ended up getting something off of MPB instead.
|
| I believe this is the scam. Set up two accounts. Sell one
| account to another account with a fake user and address. In
| this case, your address. Ship useless stuff to fake account,
| boost your rating in order to ease people's anxiety over
| ordering from someone with less than 100% seller rating. If the
| person getting the useless junk emails you, say you'll send a
| return label, then never do it.
| whaleofatw2022 wrote:
| As a "photography is a cheaper hobby than a boat person" I am
| semi-shocked you even considered it for only about 6ish
| percent off...
|
| Even Amazon sellers where there is a better return policy
| will happily try to pass nonfunctional stuff as working and
| hope nobody notices till after the return period.
|
| (And that, actually happened on a 500$ used a6000. Looked
| like it worked gr8 till you tried to take a picture)
| keyringlight wrote:
| Many sellers will cut whatever corners they can to get a
| lower price point, as that's what purchasers look for. The
| one that stands out to me is shipping, sure go for for
| cheap shipping on a trivial cost item, but I question doing
| the same when you're buying something expensive and not
| consider spending some proportion of the price on a better
| courier/service tier to have more certainty the item will
| get to you and in good condition, assuming the seller
| doesn't bake-in the cost of upgraded courier.
| buildbot wrote:
| Not the only scam on eBay these days -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47566523
| rhoopr wrote:
| This site features one of the worst fonts I've ever seen.
| chihuahua wrote:
| I thought so, too - dangerously close to Comic Sans, but for
| the block-quote, they throw in a cursive lowercase L. Just the
| one letter in cursive. I assume font nerds are going "ooh, it's
| so subtle, so elegant!"
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| Oh! I recognize that font from the recent thread on fonts!
| It's called Maple Mono[0], and yeah the connected cursive
| italic lowercase l is weird. But it's also
| implemented/designed poorly[1], and there's a chance it only
| looks awful because of that (lol). But IDK because there's no
| example of it being done well to compare against. It
| certainly would look less weird if they just didn't try to
| connect them to preceding letters. Anyway, someone was
| gushing about it, and that struck me as very odd specifically
| because of how bad the lowercase italic l is, but you _can_
| disable that feature if you want. So maybe that 's the
| version they were using.
|
| [0] - https://github.com/subframe7536/Maple-font
|
| [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47580590
| Fnoord wrote:
| The cursive _l_ I actually like. We learn to write that
| here at elementary school (at around the age of six). So if
| quoting, a handwritten font is nice. I use such in my nvim
| config as well. But AFAIK such a font is proprietary. Now,
| this fella 's repo owner is CN, so I doubt they learned
| such at elementary school. It is also, like you said, weird
| since it stands out. If the rest also used cursive
| handwriting letters it would've been fine. So yeah, classic
| case of cha bu duo, or a quick personal hack you'd be
| embarrassed to share).
| the_arun wrote:
| Few years ago. A buyer cheated me on eBay. Basically, they
| purchased my mac and asked me to ship it to their son's address.
| They paid money through Paypal & cancelled the transaction after
| I shipped it. eBay didn't help/pay me because I didn't ship it to
| buyer's registered address. There is no accountability on eBay
| end. I lost $1.5K laptop. An expensive learning. Since then, I
| don't use eBay.
| matt_heimer wrote:
| I shipped with signature verification to the buyers address.
| The buyer claimed they didn't receive the item and eBay still
| sided with them and refunded their money. I will never sell
| anything on eBay again.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Something similar happened to a friend who sold a camera on
| eBay.
|
| They took eBay to small claims court and won easily. eBay paid
| them out (and then banned them but they had already stopped
| using eBay by then).
| plagiarist wrote:
| The scammer is doing so much effort for like... PS85?
| sneak wrote:
| Got sold obviously counterfeit goods on eBay. eBay denied a
| refund despite me having clear photo evidence. Had to do a
| chargeback via the card. Will probably lose my 28 year old eBay
| account over this.
|
| I'm convinced the platforms are more than aware of the wide range
| of frauds and simply don't care; they are complicit.
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