A few ebay queries - selling and escrow services - scam?

[brammers]

Hi all

A couple of you might remember I failed to read the rules and stuck a Nokia 6600 package up for grabs on the FS forum, apologies. Anyway, its now on ebay and doing well.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...ADME:B:LC:UK:1

Anyways, I've had quite a bit of interest for this item, as you can see the reserve is met by somebody I feel quite happy about dealing with and I've covered my back pretty well, saying I want payment cleared my end before I ship.

But included amongst the bids are a few e-mails I'm concerned about. The first was a blatent scam attempt from Indonesia, the "can I pay you using a credit card, out of ebay and offer you more money?" one which I dealt with easily. But since then I've had the following two e-mails, both from Romania...

Dear thebramleysnotts,

hi. i saw your auction for the phone and im interested in it. if the price is not too high, i think i can buy it straight away. im leery of buying from the internet so i would like to pay via adtech-dealers.net i would have gladly used paypal but i can open an account from here in romania. im working in romania for a foreign company, so i would need to have it delivered here, on my expense, of course. if you would like to let me buy your phone and pay for it via adtech-dealers.net please reply with your price. thanks ps: more about adtech here: http://www.adtech-dealers.net/overview.php

K, that's the first one, and I replied saying "Shipping is ok, but I need to check out that service before I agree to it and you're paying all costs." I also offered to use a more popular escrow service if I didn't ok his.

So, anyone heard of http://www.adtech-dealers.net/index.php ? Their site seems pretty borderline to me... it's easy to create errors using their fee calculator and their grasp of english isn't fantastic. If someone more techy than me could check it out, make sure all the links are pointing in the right places and the coding's not just some script taken from a tutorial site etc that'd be great. Any advice about this bidder? (assuming he wins)

The second prospective bidder e-mailed:

Dear thebramleysnotts,

Hello Will you shipp the phone to Romania.and will you accept paypal? I have a +100 positive feedback. Thank you

Just seems odd to me that they're both from Romania... Is paypal a pretty safe way of getting money, assuming that I accept payment before I ship? Is his feedback likely to be because he's hacked the account? Sorry to sound so nervous, but bidding's currently at £320 and the only other thing I sold on ebay before was to a mumsy type with kids who wouldn't hurt a fly The nature of the item this time is obviously succeptable to scamming, don't want to get bitten!

Thanks in advance for your help.

Adam

[Stoo]

Scams.

probably using stolen accounts too..

Edit:A little bit of digging..

With thousands of transactions already completed, our site is making the financial world safer. In the last year, over 12 million $ US in products were exchanged through our company.

But yet the domain was only registered a month ago..

Updated Date: 10-apr-2004
Creation Date: 10-apr-2004
Expiration Date: 10-apr-2005


Deffo suspect..

[MD]

http://www.carbuyingtips.com/fraud.htm

DO NOT DEAL OUTSIDE EBAY,simple, just don;tdo it, you have no protection at all.

m@

[Atomic]

its a scam.

go and read this http://www.mannequin3d.com/powerbook/

seems very simular?

[Agent]

Its a scam, no doubt.

Read : http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.php?t=19984

[Stoo]

oh yeah, don't forget to report the account holders too

[Spud1]

teh adtech one is clearly a scam, but paypal is a very safe way of getting money so dont know about the second one...

[Stoo]

teh adtech one is clearly a scam, but paypal is a very safe way of getting money so dont know about the second one...

Paypal isn't particularly secure either..

[brammers]

Thanks for replies, was already extremely dubious about first one but you lot prooved it. The second one replied today asking me to use a similar service... So far I've had 3 queries, all of which are attempted scams! Makes me wonder about the legitimacy of the bloke actually bidding on the site... Bloody dangerous this ebay selling!

[edit can someone check out (or tell me how to do it myself) this site? www.auctionpayments.com another site a romanian is trying to get me to use... Is there anything more I can do besides reporting all these people to ebay? Seems kinda lame, I don't expect them to do that much...]

[futher edit - The second scammer is the current high bidder on my auction! FS! :E ]

[MD]

DO not do Western Union for Auctions over international waters, not wise, you have no come back. Just keep it simple.

[brammers]

I'm not intending to, I've made it clear that I'm only going to accept escrow.com from now on... Don't worry, I'm not that dumb

However all these scammers are screwing up my auction which is costing me £10, especially the one who's current high bidder. What can I do about this? Just cancel their bids? Anything more than what I've already done in reporting them both by the automated form?

[Stoo]

Amend the auction and say it's only open to UK bidders, then if you get some twit bidding from outer mongolia you can cancel their bid?

Yup, you've got will ship worldwide on there, you're going to get scammers from all over bothering you with that..