Finally, i've listed all the prevention methods and latest scams there are on ebay, but even knowing all this, you can only REDUCE, NEVER ELIMINATE the risks out on ebay. The best you can do since most sellers don't use escrow.com is to keep the max bid at a very low $$ level like under $20-$50 or other cheap amount you can afford to lose forever so that if you get ripped off, that's all you'll lose AND also, STICK TO THE TOP PAYMENT METHODS I ADVISE WHICH ARE:

• ESCROW.COM or other thoroughly researched/verified escrow site OF YOUR CHOOSING AND NOT THE SELLER'S
• **CREDIT CARDS or **DEBIT CARDS WITH BUYER-FAVORABLE POLICIES VIA PAYPAL
• **CREDIT CARDS or **DEBIT CARDS WITH BUYER-FAVORABLE POLICIES TO A REPUTABLE SELLER YOU'VE DONE THOROUGH RESEARCH ON.

Even with these payment types, I advise not to buy expensive items because:

• you may still have a problem weeks or months later with the seller's item after paying via Escrow.com
• of "Agent" or "Intermediary" Paypal scam
• if Paypal doesn't rule your way but you manage to dispute it with Visa or Mastercard, ebay or paypal may send you a collection letter afterwards, thereby hurting your credit record.
• Paypal and ebay only allow a VERY LOW NUMBER of transactions (only 2 transactions per year the last time I looked) to be disputed the buyer's way--so if you have a bad streak running into bad sellers or scammers, ebay/paypal is not obligated to help you recover funds later on.
• Paypal will put limits on your paypal acct
• Your CC company may put black marks on your credit report when you dispute charges, especially if you keep bumping into bad and/or scam sellers
• of rare scams like fencing by the scammer, robbery after scammer sells it to you, violence, etc.
• Paypal may only be able to "recover" only a TINY portion. One poster notes, "I too was ripped off by a seller for $63 and paypal only recovered $.09"

  Another poster's posts:"Lots accept Paypal but it doesn't mean its not a scam. Try getting $4000+ USD back from Paypal, its as unsafe as sending a money order! My bank honors Paypal chargebacks that were instand transfer through Credit Card. Does anybody know is this usually a guaranteed protection, meaning ViSA will try to get your money back with almost 100% success rate if any funny business occurs (non delivered items, damaged items with no refunds, etc..)? I've found Paypal's complaint process almost 100% ineffectual because the fraudulent seller always transfers the money out and paypal usually recovers like $7 bucks on a $2000 item!"

  So your best safeguard is TO CONTROL:

• HOW YOU BUY- Do your research first online for a few weeks and in your nearby stores offline. Do they give you a better price/service/guarantee/waranty, etc even if the difference is slight? If they do, then don't waste time, hassle, & money chasing after scam sellers with something anonymous like ebay.
• WHO YOU BUY FROM-

  BE CHOOSY AND PICKY AND HAVE EXTREMELY HIGH STANDARDS WHEN YOU CHOOSE YOUR SELLER. If you want that warranty, then don't buy from ANY ebay seller. If you want a seller with 700 FB's OR OVER 1000 FB'S OR OVER 2000 FB'S with 99% or more positive who's been an ebayer for over 8 years, then keep to those standards. THE CHOOSIER & PICKIER YOU ARE AS A CONSUMER, THE LESS OFTEN YOU'LL GET RIPPED OFF.

  INVESTIGATE THOROUGHLY AND YOU'LL REDUCE YOUR CHANCE OF RISK. Don't just glance at the feedback & make an instant decision. Analyze it and his past/present auctions 70 ways from Sunday. Verify contact info. with the national phone operator & speak directly with the seller, looking out for "contact info" tricks. If needed, call his neighbors in the phone book. Choose a seller who's closeby inside or near your city or state for easier access & enforcement. DON'T BE SCARED OR EMBARRASSED EMAILING/CALLING THE SELLER'S PAST BUYERS AND NEIGHBORS FOR REFERENCES. IT'S YOUR $$$'s YOU LOSE IF YOU DON'T REMAIN SCEPTICAL AND INVESTIGATE THOROUGHLY.

  For the same reasons, never buy outside the U.S. and yes, I know buyers in other countries get scammed from sellers in the U.S., but my point is that wherever the buyer is located, only the buyer knows whether the enforcement in their country will be even minimally effective against their country's scammer. For U.S. buyers, law enforcement in the U.S. is slow but at least it's existent & you as the buyer will have no trouble with language & customs with law enforcement compared to losing your $$ to a scammer in the Ukraine, Singapore, Nigeria, Europe, or other 3rd world country and dealing with their corrupt law enforcement or a situation where the language/customs/laws, etc is unfamiliar to you as a buyer as well as dealing with expensive long distance phone bills and the time difference.

  What if the seller is in the U.S. and doesn't want to give out their true contact info and/or doesn't answer your emails when you ask them for this info?

  Then don't buy from this seller. The most important thing for me as a buyer is to feel comfortable giving my $$ to a total stranger. It's true as I wrote on the "Speedy Sheet" that I won't bother to verify contact info for "very-LOW-cost-easy-to-forget-if-lost-to-a-scammer" items, but that's just the way I feel regarding risk as long as I've done all my other research on the item online & thoroughly analyzed the feedback of the seller, looking out for FB tricks & acct hijacking. If you really care about your $$'s then it's up to you to determine your comfort level for risk.

• THE TYPES OF ITEMS YOU BUY- Avoid HCD & 3-digit or over $$ items. Buy these things at reputable stores, not some anonymous online nonsense like the ebay system.
• THE AMOUNT OF YOUR BID- there's no guarantee that you won't be scammed if it's less than 3 digits, but at least your loss is minimal. I've been scammed on $1 postcards that never arrived from "excellent feedback" non-hijacked sellers. Others have lost money for $20 shirts, clothing, trinkets, etc. THE POINT IN KEEPING YOUR BID LOW IS TO MINIMIZE YOUR LOSS TO THE SCAMMER.
• TYPE OF PAYMENT- Your last avenue of protection is HOW YOU SEND PAYMENT. Don't send out payment that's basically "cash-like" without the ability for you to get your money back easily. Even using Paypal is hazardous. But if you must, choose Paypal via your buyer-favorable CC or debit card OR escrow.com OR ask the seller if you can visit to check out & pay for the item while visiting the seller. NEVER JUST ACCEPT OR REACT TO AN EMAIL FROM Paypal, ebay, escrow.com, even the seller unless you can call them at their LEGITIMATE WORLD WELL-KNOWN PHONE DIRECTORY PHONE NUMBERS OTHERWISE YOU'LL BE COMMUNICATING WITH A SCAMMER WHO'LL TRY TO GET THE MONEY AWAY FROM YOU NO MATTER IF THEY HAVE TO PRETEND THEY'LL ACCEPT PAYPAL VIA CC OR ESCROW.COM & THEN THEY LEAD YOU TO A FAKE WEBSITE AND/OR GIVE YOU FAKE SCAM MESSAGES. Even with these forms of payment, you can still be scammed. For instance you don't find out until days or weeks or months later that the item is counterfeit or doesn't work (DOA) but you've already paid. Then there's fencing & triangulation. SOOOOO, it basically goes back to "How you Buy", "Who you buy from", etc. like a VICIOUS circle.

If the only sellers selling your item are sellers with 0 or low feedback or bad neutrals/negs and/or private feedback and/or pre-approval auctions and/or feedback padders and/or feedback shillers and/or account hijackers or any number of things that make the seller look bad, DON'T BID!! YOU ARE IN CONTROL OF YOUR MONEY, NOT THE BAD SELLER OR SCAMMER.

SCAMMER EVOLUTION: Be aware that scammers change their tactics when they see we "suckers" aren't biting their bait. Stay 5 steps ahead.

• If the scammers are not getting bites with 3-digit or more HCD items, they'll move into the lower cost non-HCD item categories e.g. videos, clothes -- Don't ever think you're safe even if you're in a non-HCD category
• If the scammers are not getting bites with WU or other money wire transfer payments or their fake escrow sites, they'll move into cash, money orders, cashier's checks, paypal, bidpay, you name it.
• If the scammers can't get bites without paypal, they'll hijack Paypal accounts or as in the articles mentioned, they'll get visiting foreigners or visiting students as their "agents" for their Paypal accounts. The foreigners don't care since they won't be in the U.S. that long.
• In the past, keeping info on your computer and doing online business safely was not too hard a problem. Now, with it easier for the scammers to get into our computers(read "Updates" in Index),
  • think of your computer as disposable and never put your Social Security Number in it, your financial info, banking info, etc on it and
  • never do online commerce except with a DEBIT VISA CARD from a different bank that is separate from your main account with a very small amount of $'s that you can afford to lose which should be used ONLY FOR ONLINE (This way you can pretty much tell that the scam originated from an online source). Too many people are losing their $$'s and financial credit futures to these scammers. Some idiots in various news articles on the web and the media (and I have to say idiots since it's hard to compare losing money to a local criminal to losing money to a corrupt 3rd world scammer) say that giving your CC info on the web is no different than giving it to a waiter who steals your info. That's completely wrong. Yes, in both cases you have to be careful of who you give your info to (since yes there are scammers in the little shops & restaurants to whom you hand out your CC), but there IS a difference. It's easy to track a scam waiter who's stealing customers' CC numbers and easy enough for our local police to put them in jail since they're in the U.S.A. (This easily happened one time when some scammer stole my CC number and was tracked to a shoe store where other customers' info was being stolen. The police dragged him away.) This is a hell of a lot different from a scammer on the web who is hard to track and even harder to impossible to bring to jail since he'll more than likely be in some corrupt third world country where the police in that country could care less about putting the scammer in jail as long as the scammer keeps paying them off with the $$'s he sucks from suckers in our country.
  • Get a safer email application or do away COMPLETELY with your email. Yeah, it's a pain but possible. You could also keep a few disposable webemails but just use them for "Hi" and "Bye" to friends and never for online commerce of any type.
  • Always make sure you're running a firewall and the latest AVG & latest antispyware applications.
  • Switch your browser to a safer browser or better yet, think about saving up for that safe sprightly Apple computer.

*****
***YOU BECOMING A SELLER:

If you want to be a seller, it's also very difficult and you will have to do research all over ebay and the web on all the scams that sellers run into. I don't want to list them here and don't pay as much attention to them because it's hard enough just being a buyer AND there are already a lot of sites dealing with bad buyers and not enough sites on dealing with scammers or bad sellers, the negative side of ebay, compiled worst ebay scams with many scams, advanced/detailed scam info, phishing Internet websites, ebay alternatives, and preventing yourself from being scammed, all of which is why I created this site. i sold a little a couple years ago and if i have to clean my attic again, i'll probably sell again, but after seeing how difficult it is just dealing with scammer buyers and bad buyers on ebay, i gave up on selling professionally rather early and relegate myself these days as an "ebay retiree" (hehehe:-)) to mainly buying cheap stuff there under $20.

If you finally are despondent about the scamming, here's some links on scam-baiting, basically scammers themselves getting scammed, hehehehe :-)

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s= &threadid=1016390
scamorama.com
http://www.scammertainment.nm.ru/scam7.htm
http://www.bustedupcowgirl.com/scam5.html
http://www.monkeyspit.net/inbox/
http://www.savannahsays.com/kizombe.htm
http://www.geocities.com/a_kerenx/
http://www.geocities.com/steerp1ke/David_Ehi.html
http://www.maineantiquedigest.com/articles/jun03/indo0603.htm
http://www.quatloos.com/brad-c/directory01.htm
http://www.scamorama.com/lordkenneth-ekpontu.html
http://www.ladsfromlagos.com
Ppppowerbook for a Scammer on slashdot.org
http://www.419eater.com/index.htm

Other sites about computers or computer/computer-related bargains or other bargains were listed by other posters on slashdot so i'll list them here with their comments (Remember, the "i's" below are not my comments but the comments of other slashdot posters):

always check Reseller Ratings [resellerratings.com] before buying..

http://www.overstock.com - there are great deals here (e.g. Dan's Chocolates [chocolates with standards equal to European chocolates] is cheaper here than on his website)

http://www.qvc.com - there are a lot of great deals on QVC (e.g. quality steaks/meats) http://www.smarterliving.com/
http://www.slickdeals.net/
http://www.fatwallet.com/
http://www.newegg.com/
http://www.pcsurplusonline.com/
http://www.harborfreight.com/
http://www.homier.com/
http://www.techbargains.com
ncix.com is like tigerdirect.com but tigerdirect.com has horrible return policy and bad rebates
http://www.geeks.com/
http://www.dealmein.net/ bargains and deals
I find tons of tech deal in the forums area of Anandtech ( http://forums.anandtech.com/ ), specifically in the "Hot Deals" area.
http://www.pricegrabber.com/ calculates shipping, etc.
http://digitalknowhow.com/ bargain finders who avoid rebates
http://www.freeafterrebate.info/
Computer Geeks [compgeeks.com]
Net Seller [netseller.com]
PC Onramp aka EPC [pconramp.com]
Directron [directron.com]

Before I make any purchase online, I always send it through Pricegrabber [pricegrabber.com] to make sure I'm getting the lowest price, as well as check Funtasia [funtasia.net] for any coupon codes to sweeten the pot. Be sure to check the merchant ratings. It's sometimes wiser to spend a few more bucks to get it from a more reputable vendor rather than go through the headache of harassing a company to send you your stuff and later disputing a charge with the CC company (take it from one who learned the hard way!).

Computerlandcentral [computerlandcentral.com] breaks down the deals by date by store like many sites. However, they are also good about publishing coupon codes, where many sites (TechBargains, XPBargains, FatWallet, ...) make you click through the link to get the coupon discount. The code is really helpful if you want to start shopping some place like eBates [ebates.com] or FatWallet [fatwallet.com], to get a small rebate on total purchase.

PriceScan [pricescan.com] is a price search engine with a difference: It lets you look for things that are "functionally equivalent" to your search terms. I often find results for stores that don't show up on PriceWatch, PriceGrabber, or MySimon.

B.G. Micro [bgmicro.com] is sort of like All Electronics [allelectronics.com] in that they carry a ton of surplus electronic junk, download both catalogs and enjoy! Also try American Science and Surplus [sciplus.com] for a wider variety of tech stuff, toys, labware, and millitary goods.

Bargainshare.com is sort of a better version of fatwallet. Deals tend to be killed by the shear volume of abusers at FW, and posters are chastized for posting deals (and trying to help their fellow man) by trolls and flamers who are simply out to spoil other peoples experiences. People at Bargainshare tend to be much friendlier, and deals that hit there first last much longer than on FW, giving you more of a chance of actually getting in on them. It's a lot more technically sophisticated, with board software that allows you to filter by criteria that are important to you.

Also, BS has a protected deal area for hot deals that would be killed if posted to the general public restricted to only positive contributors for the hardcore deal followers out there.

Clinko.com [clinko.com] is just a module off of my full site Protista.com [protista.com]. But, it's the main attraction because it parses bensbargains [bensbargains.net] and slickdeals [slickdeals.net] so I can check them at work.

I second carbuyingtips.com, and I further recommend carsdirect. I bought my car from there, PGE (pretty good experience)
*****
Here are a few more of MY recommendations:

A lot of times, the sellers on ebay are commercial sellers and will have a website on the internet even if they don't post a link on their ebay ad. Just type in their ebay name into the search engine and you may possibly hit their website. YOU STILL HAVE TO CHECK/VERIFY CONTACT INFO (Look at the "Phishing Websites Part 2" section) and call the business to make sure what exact URL website(s) they use (to avoid phishing website scammers), but generally going to the website may be even better than dealing with ebay. Assuming it's a legitimate business at the website on the internet, the products may be more variable, s/h is more reasonable, there may be more products, and since they're a legitimate business, it's easier to deal with them than to deal with the scrict rules on ebay, especially with having to wait until auction ends or waiting until seller relists the same item you missed bidding on in time, feedback, retractions, and NPB. For purchasing thru any internet website, have a debit card with a low purchase amount to prevent scammers running up the bill.

A lot of times, going thru BUSINESSES (not individuals--there are too many individuals that lie, especially if the amount of $$ is high) that list items on Amazon.com is easier since you're giving your CC number to Amazon payments and not directly to the seller and you just like most people probably already have accounts at Amazon anyway so you don't need to input new data into an unfamiliar website and most times, prices are lower on Amazon than on the actual websites. Lots of businesses sell products thru Amazon.com. I've had WAY less problems dealing with Amazon than with ebay who will do very little to help you.

NOW FOR THE QUIZ--I hope this quiz helps as well as my website so you can make better informed decisions bidding and buying on ebay and the Internet.

Click here for the Summary Quiz--If you miss alot of questions, redo them.

Click here for Quiz Answers--No Cheating!! :-)

abbreviations for many ebay terms

Index page

Updates page-contains any major updates after 6/8/04