Caveat Emptor On EBay

[Shamalama]

After three years of buying and selling on eBay I finally got scammed. This issue is still pending so I’m not going to post any names (yet) but here’s the story.

I bought a 4GB USB flash RAM drive on eBay back in November. I’ve purchased these before with great success and great savings. Fortunately I had already read “BEWARE of Counterfeit USB Flash Drives“, an eBay Guide detailing problems on eBay with fake drives. So I already knew that there were a lot of fakes out there being sold, and I knew how to spot one.

IMPORTANT: If you do buy one of these devices the first thing to do is to write an amount of data to the drive equal to its capacity, and then read back the same data from the drive to another location on my PC to compare.

After writing about 2GB any further writes failed. And nothing at all could be read back.

So I contacted the seller, someone with a Feedback score of 140 and a Positive feedback of 96%, and requested a replacement due to defect. He was happy to do so.

About a week later the replacement arrived and - gasp - the same thing happened. Now I don’t want any replacement, I believe this guy is either knowingly or unknowingly selling crap. I requested an immediate complete refund.

“no probleme just return it and iwill issue a reund promptly thanks”

The piece of junk flash drive is now in the mail going back to Cleveland, OH.

There are no “Bad” comments anywhere in his Feedback, so am I the only one that’s received crap? Or is everyone else technically ignorant?

Something else - he used to sell a bunch of these drives, yet today it doesn’t look like he’s selling anything? As a matter of fact there is nobody from Ohio selling flash drives today. Has he switched identities to minimize bad feedback?

[Sekhmet]

Distinct possibility. He's probably frantically pulling up stakes and letting the stink blow over before popping his head back up. It's late in the Christmas shopping season, we're about to hit the January slump with retail anyway, it was a perfect time to ninja-vanish and thereby not have to deal with the repercussions of peddling junk.

And I can guarantee you he has at *least* three or four IDs that he's been bouncing between, likely ditching one about once a quarter in favor of a new one.

[MDF3530]

I heard the feds broke up an international scam ring on Ebay based here in Chicago and Romania. They were reportedly offering items directly for sale and demanding thousands of dollars.

[kb0iic]

You'll find a lot of IT equipment auctioned with a location in the US and the item location is in China, Europe, or India. Maybe even in Indonesia. Keep a look out.