One more falls to an Internet Auction Scam!
Sometime back I wrote about how people selling stuff at online auction sites should be wary of being cheated by fraudulent buyers. About how they might be duped through payments made in the form of fraud checks or money orders.
As highlighted by a Channel 6 news story, online buyers are more at peril of getting caught in a scam. They run the risk of paying for goods that never ever materialize. In fact, such scams constitute 72% of all crimes committed online.
College student Ashley Loftus bought a car at Craigslist by carving out the payment for it from her savings. She first sought to make the payment through Western Union money transfer. But, David Balliet, the seller at the auction site returned it saying that he would prefer to receive payment through a third-party website.
She was led to believe that this third-party would be eBay.com. The fraudster in fact stated to her that such an arrangement would be of mutual interest. While true, this could have clouded his real intentions for insisting on an online payment.
By refusing to collect payment sent through money transfer, the fraudster was preserving his identity. He would have had to compromise his identity if he chose to collect the payment made in this manner. Instead, he directed her to a site, she believed to be eBay, for making the payment.
Although all auction sites are equally abused by scammers for receiving payments, eBay is a particular favorite with fraudsters for this purpose. They communicate with buyers using id’s like ebay@xxxxxx.com. This leads buyers to believe that the seller is using an email account held by regular members at eBay.com.
Actually eBay does not offer a facility for collecting payments on behalf of members of other websites. They do have their own payment processing system. It eliminates the need for using wire transfer while making payments in the course of a transaction at the site. But this facility is not available for buyers or sellers from other auction sites.
Also, unlike the address given by this fraudster, email accounts of eBay have addresses that have @ebay.com as their suffix.
Probably, Ashley could have been warned early enough if she knew either of the above facts. But she was kind enough to let others learn and be warned from a personal experience by making the scam public.
Related posts: