I posted my HDTV on ebay UK and got a bid. The bidder sent a question saying if he won could I post it as soon as I could because he had just moved house and they did not have anything. That was fine with me. He wins the bid but only then did I realise he was bidding from the Netherlands. I thought that was a reasonable place to post something to so still no alarm bells. I could never get why for every email I received when I clicked reply service@paypal.com came up in the box but I never questioned why this was. I just thought it was a fault. Communicating was difficult but as he said English was not his first language no alarm bells there either. His ebay account was no longer active though I did not think that was my business to ask about. He said he wanted me to paypal the money quite early on in the transaction so I did not think much there either. I got forwarded copies of his confirmation of payment of paypal from him. It said that to deposit funds into my account shipping details needed to be forwarded to transferteam@mailconsultant.com. I did find that weird but the reason the email gives is it protects buyers and sellers from fraudulent transactions by requesting shipping details first. I gave the shipping reference and assumed the ‘team’ waits for the order to reach the destination before releasing funds. I had been thinking the converse too – that this new system is there to protect buyers from bogus sellers who say they are selling something take the money and vanish. The tracking number shows the item was delivered yesterday and signed for by the person in the email correspondence I had. Paypal has just emailed me that they have no record of any recent transactions into my account and that money is just deposited immediately when a transaction takes place. I was thinking at first that maybe the money is just a little late. However it is dawning on me that no money was ever sent and these people trawl the site until they can find someone that unaware of ebay processes. The police say ebay has a team to deal with fraudsters. Ebay says it is a law enforcement issue. Trading standards did not even reply to me. I saw online other people had fallen for this before too. I was really questioning my judgement ability until I saw this had duped others.
This post was submitted by Ronald.
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