eBay Nigeria scam

[Rmil6617]

Hi all 

I have sold my iPad on eBay the buyer has not paid for it. This has been going on for a couple of days they are sending me email saying they are going to make payment. The eBay account has an address in London and zero feedback. The first email I got said they are away on business and will make payment today. So I get an email today saying they have made payment via PayPal . It had a PayPal email receipt attached to it that looks very genuine they have included an extra  hundred pounds and want me to send it to Nigeria also a note on the email that states the transaction will show as pending on PayPal until I send about tracking number. 

I believe this is a scam has anyone else experienced the same thing ?. 

[AlexAxl]

Hi All, 

I can confirm this information is 100% legit. I was selling an iPad air yesterday and after listing my item I got a "buyer" after only  10 minutes under the name of "mistibarne0", needless to say this account was created the same day and had zero feedback.He also asked me to send him recent pics via email to verify the item was really in good condition. He asked my paypal address via ebay mail which I considered normal, so I replied.

Minutes later I received an email from the said person claiming to have done a paypal payment of extra £40 (with a Paypal heading in the subject line, to make it look legit!).  I started to smell the **bleep** oozing from this deal, so I went ahead and sent him a couple of pics from a general email address.... As expected, any communication with this guy took place outside of ebay from that point onwards, plus this genious asked to have the item shipped to Nigeria. When I told him I will not do it, he sent me an email with this heartbreaking story: 

"Thanks for the mail,there will not be any problem when posting the item and am assuring you that the item will be save that's reason why i ask you to post the item via Royal Mail international signed for safety of the item and it will get there before the date just make sure you get the item post with the service i required and you will be giving the tracking number after posting the item more so i know that i suppose to provide you my UK address but the issue is that i'm outside the city now for a business and it will take me few months before i can get back to the city and if you post it to my UK address no one will receive the item and I've also promise the celebrate (my partner) that his birthday gift will reach his place before the party date that is also the reason why i made the postage cost to £40. please i want you to get the item post out today and so that it will get there before the date because i don't want the item to belated gift read from you asap. "

Here you can see to what lenghts these fucktards will go to steal your money and items. I cancelled the order and raised a security report. I have since changed my paypal address and password. Lessons learned: 

- NEVER Communicate with buyers outside of ebay, if they insist in doing so, that's a red flag.

- NIGERIA. Huge RED FLAG.So RED the communist party would be envious. 

- Unsolicited payments for shipment to any other location than explained in the ad. REG FLAG.

- Do not give any personal information to these people under any circumstances

- Report a security incident to Ebay if you are victim.

Stay safe kids!

[lee640]

also be wary of cynthia mabel,

tried scammin me out of £460 for sale of my car , courier wanted this first before paypal payed me,,,,,,

OBVIOUSLY I CHECKED MY ACCOUNT FIRST>>>>>

WHO IN THE RIGHT MIND WOULD PAY A COURIER IN NIGERIA FOR TRANSPORT OF VEHICLE IN UK?????

THE PAYPAL EMAIL LOOKED SO CONVINCING SO ID ASK EVERYONE IN FUTURE TO ACTUALY CHECK THERE ACCOUNT FOR FUNDS AND DONT RELY ON A DODGY FAKE EMAIL...

[Perryman001]

Hello All,

I am a Nigeria and I have been buying stuff on eBay sent to my address in Nigeria without any issues what so ever!

I was shocked when I stumbled upon this forum castigating Nigerian's as scammers, having read through all your comments, what I could deduced from it is that;

Everybody that fell victim to "this scam" was in violation of eBay/PayPal regulations that prohibits communication outside of the eBay platform.

The transaction process on eBay is pretty simple! Payment for intended goods can be done on the eBay platform without asking the seller for their PayPal account.

Please all, when asked for your PayPal account, you can refer the buyer to your listing and ask 'em to 'checkout' on the item by following the instructions instead of cutting-corners.

It is wrong to generalize a Country as scammers just because you didn't play by the "rules"

Play safe!

[kernowlass]

@Perryman001

Except that in all the time i have been on this board and read threads re scams 99.9% of the time the address to send the goods to was Nigeria, just do a google search and you will see that.

Also the scammers HIJACK ebay usernames bid and buy but then ask to pay via paypal and not ebay checkout. That is NOT against ebay rules as long as the seller marks the payment as received in their ebay account.

The reason a lot of folks are scammed is because they are new and don't always know how things work, its the scammers in Nigeria that i blame not the innocent folk that are scammed.

[jenniferFa]

I thank all of you for warnings. Luckily I got a intuition 1 hour after giving package to post office to look it up. They asked for tracking numbers and said they paid with fake PayPal email. First I got an email stating they purchase my iphone. Did not know it was fake. Then pay pal. Well after I read posts I went back to posts office and retrieved my package. They kept emailing for two days. I got on eBay account only to notice that they never bid on it. It was all a scam.postmaster said that they keep talking to you until it go through customs which is the point of no return Then ,you never hear from them thank to all of you.

[CGee110245]

Hi, the same thing happened to me as well.. please whoever is reading this, do not ever agree to sell outside of eBay. I recently placed a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+ on EBay and overnight I received a quick response. This person was offering to pay more than what I was offering on eBay and I thought this was amazing. In no moment did I ever think that it was weird or off that they didn't try to buy THROUGH eBay which is safer, because eBay cares for seller safety. But being the idiot I was, I believed this person. But to be quite honest, my suspicion meter was going off. 2nd alarm bell should've gone off once this person told me that he was going to email me from his "personal" email. So we talked and I got an email from what seemed like PayPal saying that ESCROW was holding my payment of $947 from the buyer and will be released into my account as soon as I send a tracking number to a certain email. I said okay fine, easy enough. At no point did I ever remember that this could've been a scam and all of this was getting fishy. So I send the package and the tracking number to this email I was instructed to. And I receive another email from eBay warning me that it is dangerous to sell outside of eBay because they were monitoring my account. After this I started to get a bad feeling. The email I received from so called PayPal (which seemed extremely real) said that within 48 hours my money would be put into my PayPal. 48 hours later.... nothing. Keep in mind, I had been tracking the package I sent through DHL online to see where it was. After I received no payment whatsoever, I decided to call DHL and put the package on hold so it wouldn't arrive wherever it was supposed to be arriving. The buyer emails me and tells me that PayPal informed them that the money hasn't reached my account because network issues blah blah blah. After all these excuses I became fed up and finally decided to just leave it. Currently trying to battle to receive my package back to my house and ignoring all these emails from the scammer & "PayPal". Please be safe. DO NOT sell outside of eBay. If you receive any messages on eBay from someone offering to buy the object, tell them to buy it through eBay and not outside of eBay. PayPal and eBay are usually trying to protect us so if it were a scam, they would inform us beforehand (they've done so for me in the past). Don't give out your information to anyone, just make sure if you're selling on eBay, ONLY sell through eBay because they make sure that the buyer isn't a scammer. PayPal NEVER asks you to send tracking details before receiving payment. I did not know this until now. Don't make the same mistakes I have made please.

[thetam]

Still active, using eBay with user name and email address as below

matchu72

cdhhtt3 (at) outlook.com

This is my first time using eBay to sell an item and thankfully, I checked and the below came up, all sounded too good to be true.

[Brewer813]

Thank you for this I had just googled one of the email addresses I was asked to send money to cdhhtt3 (at) outlook.com and this thread came up. I have had three already trying to get me to send my PayPal details for my iPad Pro. To be honest it has got to the point where I don't think I want the hassle of selling on eBay again. All I've had so far is scammers.

[kernowlass]

@Brewer813

High cost items are often targeted.

However scammers use hijacked Ebay user id's BUT can't checkout with Ebay as they can't use paypal.

So they ask you to ''invoice'' them instead, thats the giveaway as the payment email you get from paypal is fake.

Also they will tell you that the payment will only show in your paypal balance once you supply a tracking number, this is not true.

Even if your funds are on hold as a new seller the funds will always show in your paypal balance but have pending by them.

No funds in your paypal balance = you have not been paid.

[LaurVictoria]

Oh thank goodness. I was selling a camera on eBay and they asked for way more money I asked £60 they said £105 plus £30 for shipping??? It's bad I believed them but the PayPal email looked real but then very out of place. I reported it to spoof PayPal and the confirmed it as a scam. The person wanted me to sell it to Nigeria for a cousin on charity work apparently. Can't believe they are still doing this it's horrible. They are telling me that the funds have been taken from their account and only sent another strange PayPal email to me because I said do not scam me (silly of me) I'm not sure what to do. Can they really do anything? But ah this is a little irritating.