Disturbing

I just checked my office voicemail.  There are a couple messages from someone in the 402 area code regarding questions about a laptop on eBay that he bid on and won.

I’ve never sold anything on eBay.

Hopefully it’s a wrong number.  Maybe he sought out a number for a similarly named company.

I did have an eBay account that I used to buy a couple things a few years ago, and it was associated with the office’s mailing address.  The name of the business is such that people often assume we sell computers.  Which we do kind of, sometimes, to people we service and their employees, but not in a “that’s what we do” sort of way, and never involving laptops.

I hope someone isn’t pretending to be me and defrauding people.  Probably not, but it’s the first thing that entered my mind.  I called and left a message telling them they had the wrong number, but if someone’s pretending to be me I’d want to know.

1. Something like that happened to me once.  I’ve used ebay 1 time.

   From what I remember (in terms of what my parents told me happened), people would call the house asking for me [though I wasn’t living there].  Peolple were calling about a variety of items I’d supposively sold ‘em--and I literally mean variety (even vaccum cleaners).

   Apparently someone was using my info or identity to re-sell items (at a higher cost) which they’d previously purchased (at a discount)/

   I forget how the situation was resolved in the end, but I know I was in no way at fault.

   Posted by jaws  on  05/21  at  07:15 PM

2. Check all your credit card and checking account statements right now.

   The week I moved to Georgia, someone [who we’ll call “A"] stole my credit card number through eBay/Paypal and yanked out a $1600 payment for something on eBay.  Then someone else [who we’ll call “B"] called me and said A had used that money to pay for an item B had been selling on eBay.  However, the item B had been selling was only $16, and A supposedly lived in the Ukraine.

   I put a stop payment on that payment from my credit card, and then told B—who I thought at the time was aboveboard about this—what I had done.  Then B began his part of the scam.  He wanted me to unblock the payment because until I did, he couldn’t use his PayPal Visa Debit Card.

   I thought about it, and I spoke to eBay and Paypal and my credit card company, but eventually decided not to unblock the payment—in other words, to continue the “I’ve been defrauded” process through my credit card company.  (Fleet, now Bank of America, who did an excellent job with the process.) B contacted me one more time, and I told him—apologetically—that I understood his predicament, but could not afford to unblock that payment and take a chance that eBay wouldn’t reimburse me, when I could guarantee that Fleet would.

   That was when I realized that B was scamming me, possibly even working with a real person (A) in the Ukraine.  Or maybe B was using a Ukranian e-mail address to create the identity of A.  I don’t know.  But I got my $1600 back, and a new credit card number, and never heard from B again.

   I hope you haven’t been set down this path as well.

   (crossposted to Multiple Mentality)

   Posted by Josh Cohen  on  05/23  at  08:46 AM

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