Adam Jewell - Search & Affiliate Marketing

So Segways are pretty cool, kinda geeky but cool, so I decided I’d turn to Ebay to get one. Now the Segway is one of the highest fraud items on Ebay but I’ve been buying sailboats, skis, trinkets and all kinds of other stuff on Ebay since 1997 and its not to hard to spot the fraud auctions. They want you to contact them outside of Ebay and generally want some kind of wire transfer so you can’t get your money back when you don’t receive anything. It’s pretty easy to pick out those auctions and Ebay is pretty good at taking them down fairly fast, the ones that are blatant fraud that is.

While scoping out the available inventory on Ebay, I found an i80 at a decent price, made a best offer and it was accepted and paid for. That was way back at the beginning of July and its now August 24th. Still no Segway. Payment was made via PayPal which is a completely useless service for high ticket items that you get screwed on. They try to hit the sellers PayPal acount for whatever they can and then bascially say sorry, this is all we could get, we’ll try to get the rest but basically you’re fucked and we don’t care that you’re out $1000 or more dollars.

Not only does PayPal not give a shit if you get screwed but they encourage you to let them deduct the funds right from your bank account and not your credit card. If you do that on a high ticket item and the seller doesn’t come through then you are really fucked. If you pay through PayPal via your credit card at least you can take it up with the credit card company and maybe they’ll stick it to PayPal.

If you have issues with a transaction that you paid for through PayPal and had PayPal deduct the funds from your credit card and you file a complaint with PayPal and they only give you a token refund, then the dispute process with your credit card company is much more involved. You can’t just call them and dispute the charge, you have to fill out paperwork and mail it in explaining why you got a partial refund and should have gotten a full refund. What a joke!

While all this was (and is still) going on, naturally, I did a search for fraud on Ebay on some of the search engines to see what would come up, some resources, other peoples’ experiences, and low and behold, Ebay even advertises for Fraud On Ebay.

The ad reads:

Fraud On Ebay
Looking for Fraud On Ebay? Find
exactly what you want today.
www.ebay.com

Well, there is nothing like advertising that your site offers fraud & unfortunately it seems to be true, even (or maybe it should be especially) if you follow their payment guidelines and suggestions.

Hopefully the seller will come through and ship the item but in the mean time, if you have a Segway i80 or i2 and are in the Philadelphia area looking to sell, send me an email or leave a comment. I’m looking for one in the $2,000 - $3,000 range.