iA

More Nigerian eBay scams

by trevor. Average Reading Time: less than a minute.

I was looking for a Samsung D600 the other day and I was rather surprised to find that a large number of them seemed to be selling for several thousand pounds.

After my initial surprise I delved in a bit deeper and apparently this is another scam originating from the internet cafes of West Africa.

Apparently what happens is that someone sets up two eBay ID which are used to bid against each other to bid an item up to a ridiculous level. A third, “good cop” ID will then be used to sympathise with the predicament in which that has placed the seller and suggest that they do a transaction offline, using unsafe method such as Western Union.
This is a numbers game with the perpertrators running multiple scams at the same time hoping that one will work out. What worries me is with the huge volume and variety of scams out there, even the most vigilent will be caught out eventually

Thanks to Christian Braun for letting me know about this

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  • Pamela Duhon

    this happened to me last night LUCKILY i did not fall for the it I knew there was something wrong with anybody that would pay that ridiculous amount money for a computer that is used….

  • Andy

    Well, surely the key thing is that if the price is silly you don’t bid for it.

    I think you also need to have a fixed idea of what the maximum amount you are prepared to pay for an item is; and stick to it! I have lost several auctions recently because the bids exceeded my personal maximum and whilst it is slightly disappointing it is better than paying a silly amount for something.

    Remeber; all things come to he who waits…

  • Stuart Waton

    Thank you to all posting comments. I have never been a victim, but can sympathise with those that have. I frequently receive fraudulent emails from senders purporting to be from paypal or ebay: I forward these unopened to spoof@paypal.com or spoof@ebay.com and receive an acknowledgement. Does anyone out there know of a similar scheme where people can forward the fraudulent emails (usually from Nigeria) that often arrive in the Junk email folder of Hotmail? We all know that these are under investigation, as recently on the tv news it showed the Nigerian police raiding an Internet cafe & arresting several people. I always delete these emails, but am concerned that someone else may fall victim to these fraudsters.

  • Romy

    I literally just had this happen to me and I had no idea it was a scam until i searched on google “postage costs to nigeria” when it came up with all of these forums!! i was going to send it aswell i feel like a right plonker! but unfortunately I sent an invoice with my paypal details which was sent to an email address i believed to be paypal, until I noticed it says paypal@gmail.com! that is so obvious i cant believe i didnt see it! googlemail!!! of bloody course!!! ahh ebay really should make people more aware and put information on the front page, because I have been a member since 2003 and i didnt have a clue until I stumbled across these forums. Im worried now that they can do soemthign with my paypal???

  • eBay buyer

    I got scammed buying a car on eBay only to find the scammer had about ten different eBay accounts and eBay seemed more interested in protecting the seller than helping any of his victims get a bit of justice so I opened a website http://WWW.EBuster.co.uk so that anyone can see who is selling lots of cars whilst pretending to be a private seller plus it gives guide prices and car reviews and lets people know if the reserve has been met.

    The trading standards got on to eBay about my problem and have been held waiting over 6 weeks by eBay for information on the various accounts the scammer had but do watch out for a very overweight guy with short ginger hair and tattoos that operates from near junction 2 on the M5 in the UK and often used the name Garry Horton or Garry Saint.

    In addition to the above I also monitor eBay motors for pages that have script injection and make regular reports to eBay who it seems are unable to protect against such attacks even if it only takes a few lines of code.

    eBay have a habit of pulling the pages when something goes wrong as they try to brush it under the carpet so first port of call is to take a copy of the page before contacting eBay and if you need help linking various accounts together then I maybe able to help.

  • Tufty

    I haven’t been caught out as I’m aware of the scams, but I have had two Nigerian scammers over the last week on eBay.

    The first reply after selling the item (in this case, a laptop computer) was “I’m having problems paying via paypal” This was followed by another email asking for postage charges for Nigeria and the ‘suggestion’ of paying by ‘Western Union’

    The second response was similar…unable to pay via Paypal….send to Nigeria…pay through ‘Western Union’

    You just need to be aware of the scams to protect your money!