eBay Scams - Hijacked Accounts

What are Hijacked Accounts?
Hijacked eBay accounts are accounts that have been deceitfully taken from their rightful owners. A few posts back, I showed a few ways whereby the "less-than-honest" people can get some reputation, or positive feedback. Hijacking other users' accounts are just an extreme way of doing that. In some places, hijacking can be known as hacking.

How do you avoid being scammed by Hijacked Accounts?

It's not easy to detect hijacked accounts, because they were legit once. However, just because they are difficult to detect, does not mean it is impossible. There are some signs to determine if the account is hijacked or not.

1. The seller tries to make you contact them via an external e-mail address.
2. The seller is selling items of a totally different nature from the ones sold before this. It's possible to check using eBay's history function.

Some things that can be done to minimize risk are:

1. Try not to trade using wire-transfer, money order, or personal cheque. Using this is like using money. These methods offer no protection to the buyer. Companies like PayPal, though not foolproof, is a much safer bet. Make an account there and use it for all your transactions.
2. Check the bidders of the sale, if any. See if they have any other bids, or if they keep bidding on each other's items, but never buy them. Some fraudulent buyers use multiple accounts to make their bid look more appealing, and to raise the price.

By taking these simple precautionary measures, one can minimize the risk involved in trading online.

PayPal

Say goodbye to traditional paper methods, such as checks and money orders. PayPal does everything those methods do, without the hassle. It's also much safer, I've heard. What does this have to do with eBay? PayPal is a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay.

I realize PayPal has been around for quite a while, but I have never used it personally.

This means that paying your fees has become a whole lot easier. No more having to personally go down to meet your clients, or worry that the client will not show up. Worried about your item not showing up when you buy something using PayPal? Don't.

Security

PayPal has something called the "PayPal Buyer Protection", which will protect you from cases where the item does not show up, or is significantly different from what was advertised. What this means is that PayPal will cover transactions for the full purchase price and postage expenses. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a good thing. This means you don't have to worry about some joker making a quick buck out of you by selling you low quality merchandise, or running off after receiving the money.

eBay's Feedback System: Trustworthy?

The backbone of eBay's buying and selling system has always been their feedback system. Is this system really trustworthy? When this thought occurred to me, I decide to check it out.

After some research, I realized that the easiest way for somebody to get undeserved positive feedback is by buying and selling from themselves.

Multiple Accounts
Basically, there will be people who will create multiple accounts, sometimes more than a hundred, and sell things to themselves, and giving positive feedback to both the accounts. This, however, is a very time consuming thing to do, and as such people tend to gravitate towards purchasing feedback.

Feedback Sales
There are three basic ways that people can purchase feedback.

• The seller can blatantly start bids that say, for example, "I am selling feedback". These bids are often closed by eBay almost immediately when someone reports it.
• The seller can try to hide the fact that they are selling feedback, by putting it in the title, in a less obvious manner, like, "this item generates POSITIVE FEEDBACK!", and things like that, with the words "POSITIVE" and "FEEDBACK" normally in uppercase. These bids can also fail, when someone realizes that the said item is sold for an unreasonable price, or that the seller doesn't want to sell the item to someone who really wants to buy it.
• The third way almost seems like a legit bid. The seller sells a great quantity of something small and cheap, say, a cookbook. He does not really have that many cookbooks, the main purpose of this is to sell feedback for $1. He then sets the title to be something like the second point, so that people will know.

How does this affect us?
When we buy and sell items on eBay, the rule of thumb is that you should generally buy from someone with a high feedback rating. The list above shows that there are ways to circumvent the feedback system, and so people should be cautious, even if trading with someone who has a high feedback rating.

I think that most people online are good, and that they will not scam you, but there will be bad people everywhere who cannot resist the temptation of making a quick buck. This is why I recommend that whenever you trade online, be it a big or small sale, use precautions.