ebay Live Steam Scam

ebay Live Steam Scam

19 Feb 06
This is the letter I received from Ron, a "would-be" live steamer:

... I wish I had found your web site a week earlier, especially the information on fraud. I have been saving for years to purchase a scale riding train and finally bid on one that I found on Ebay.

I did not win the bid but received what I thought was a second chance offer. It was not but until I realized, I had not only lost thousands of dollars but also my dream of owning a large scale rail road. The sentence structure was exactly as your article stated with the lower case and poor sentence structure.

Ebay will not even discuss it or reveal the account owner or email owner that was involved after I gave the information to them.

22 Feb 06
After I posted Ron's letter on our main page, he wrote back:

Thanks for your concern and the chance for us to educate others. e-bay member was bocephus123 email was sent to jaromm09@yahoo.com and money was sent to Jake Marsh. not sure if this was all one person or not. Ebay will give no info to me. Very poor sentence structure with lower case i used. Thanks so much, Ron

22 Feb 06
Ron said he had reported it to ebay but ebay did not want to hear about it. I took a chance and wrote the "alleged" scammer myself in hopes he would write back. Then I would have all the "headers" that are generated with the scammers email. This is what I wrote to jaromm09@yahoo.com:

To: jaromm09@yahoo.com
Subject: re:ebay

Yes i am still interested. my last bid was 3 thousand dollars. how do you want your payment. i was thinking it was to late. i'm very excited. thank you very much.
jim

Everyone should write a scammer. It's fun and it keeps them busy. Think about it, while they're writing you, they aren't writing someone else.

23 Feb 06
I got lucky, he wrote back. This is how his scam letter looked:

From: jaromm09@yahoo.com
Subject: re:ebay

Hello,
Thank you for your e-mail!The winner of my auction didn't pay for the item and ebay advised me to use Second Chance Offer to sell my product.If you want to go ahead with this transaction please let me know and I'll contact eBay.You'll receive from them instructions regarding the payment method. Everything is made through eBay.The eBay will be totally responsable if anything should happen to our transaction and there for you or me will not have any loss, please provide me this details so i can start this transaction asap through eBay,they will contact you in the moment you will provide me this details !You will receive an aw-confirmation in-voice regarding how will be complete this transaction in safe mode.
Full name:
Address:
City:
Zipp:
Country:
eBay user ID:
Thank you!

So you might ask yourself, what do I do if I receive a scam letter, any scam letter? You should forward a copy to the the Attorney General's Office and inform the email provider, in this case it's Yahoo. To notify Yahoo, forward the scammers email to abuse@yahoo.com. It seems that "abuse" is the standard address for reporting stuff like this to all email providers.

Yahoo will shut down this jerk's email in a day or two. That will temporally interrupt communications with his current crop of pigeons. Unfortunately, he will open another email account with yahoo the next day and start all over again. It seems that yahoo and hotmail and other free email services are unable or unwilling to verify the identity of those that want to use free email services to defraud us.

I hate the scammers and the companies that turn a blind eye and allow them to continue to operate

When something else comes up, I'll keep you informed.

Jim O'Connor
editor

Protect Yourself Ask for the phone number from your buyer or seller and get the address. After you talk with them, look up the number and address using an internet Phone Book. Make sure the address and phone number match. Ask to be paid with a bank draft, then call the bank to make sure the check is good.

The above is a sad comment on the state of the internet. The web is wonderful and dangerous at the same time. It's a tool but you need to know the safety rules before you use it without getting hurt

Free Ad Scam

10 May 07
This is the letter I received from Jeannie:

Hello Mr. O'Connor:

I just wanted to alert you to a recent situation that you might want to make your readers/advertisers aware of.

My husband runs a Text Only Ad on your site for some Freight Cars he builds and we were contacted by a John Johnson (email chitex_lip@yahoo.com) the other day. He indicated he was interested in purchasing one of the freight cars and wanted to know if we accepted personal checks. We wrote back and explained that having had a couple bad experiences in the past, we now only accept Cash, Money Orders, and Certified Bank Checks. Now his English seemed OK in this email, maybe just a little rushed typing or something.

Then we received his second email. His English was pretty bad this time, but indicated he was willing to send a Certified Bank Draft for the Car and would handle the shipping himself once the payment cleared. Also indicated that he was in London, UK on conference but wanted to know our names addresses and phone numbers so he could mail the check. Naturally, we're not that naive, so we didn't reply with anything other than what he could pick up off our own web-site...our company name and mailing address. Then we also asked him to explain how he proposed to handle the shipping himself.

The next email was the most disturbing. The English was very broken (like the two different people wrote the 1st and later emails), and he indicated he actually lives in the UK and was sending a check for $2950 (the Car only costs $450 !!) and once it cleared we were to wire transfer through Western Union the $2500 balance back to him, and at some point later he would have an "agent" come to NC to pick up the car. He was also "confused" about the name to make the check out to and requested our names again.

At this point (yesterday 5/08/07) we just responded that we were canceling this "Sale", that this sounds like money laundering or some other type of scam, that we do not get involved in wire transfers, and that he was to lose our information and not contact again and we would be reporting him to various email fraud sites.

We have not heard back at this point. Thank goodness. And I did report him to email fraud at Earthlink as they host our website. I should probably report him to Yahoo too since that seems to be his email address. But I also thought you might like to hear the story as you try to warn your advertisers about these potential scams...in fact, it was the warnings on your site that made us cautious about these types of scams. So thank you!

And I hope you find this information useful.

What Jeannie has is a scammer trying to send her a forged bank draft. It's easy to make a one on a computer these days. The buyer tries to over pays Jeannie then asks her to wire some money back to a third party. The money she would have wired would be spent before her forged bank check bounce. Jeannie would have been out a lot of money. Beware of this popular scam. Perhaps it's a good idea to speak to the buyer directly by phone to make sure he's really into railroading.
I screen out 99% of these scammers when you use the First Class Ad.