Staying Safe on Ebay with Paypal

I just sold my first item on ebay ever. Unfortunately, I was almost scammed out of a couple hundred dollars. Thankfully, I am pretty experienced with the Internet in general, and am pretty tech savvy.

First off, most people would think of being scammed when buying on ebay, but not about being scammed when selling on ebay... is it even possible to be scammed on ebay when selling an item? I will tell you it is and you must be careful, I was almost scammed of $400.00. Secondly make sure you know all the terms of service when selling on ebay, cause they can actually, help protect and in my case did help me.

I was selling a used Ipod Touch which I knew wouldn't get more then $150 if I was lucky. But I didn't need it and could have used the extra cash. So I listed my first item on ebay, a used Ipod Touch. After seeing a few bids, I saw someone posted a question on my item. The question offered me $400 for the Ipod and asked me for my paypal email address. I saw the $400 offer and immediately wanted to sell my Ipod to that buyer.

My first mistake was I gave out my paypal address to this potential buyer. They immediately sent me $400 via paypal, but I noticed you were not allowed to make deals behind the curtain for an item you had listed on paypal. So me not wanting to break any rules, wanted to abide by them and declined acceptance of the money via paypal, I did not accept the money. That's another rule you should abide buy, never accept money from someone through paypal you do not know.

I then started getting emails from the person who offered me the $400 asking for a shipping receipt for the item, which was a little odd since I hadn't accepted any money from them. I then replied to the email saying I had not sent the item because I did not accept the money. They then replied back saying they were going to bring up legal action, since I had not shipped the item.

At first I was a bit scared, I did not want anyone to bring up legal actions on me, but I knew I did nothing wrong and I didn't accept any money. Next thing I knew I got an email from paypal saying a legal case was opened against me. I was starting to get a little fishy and tried emailing paypal myself via paypal customer service email address found on the paypal site.

I eventually got another email from paypal that day, which said this:
"In other for you to avoid the legal action consequence as per the buyers explanation, you are requested to refund back the money to the buyer inform of cash since the money as been scheduled for addition into your account. This money can not be reverse and refunded into the buyers account due to the paypal new policy and to avoid any fraudulent action that may occur.ou are requested to refund back a sum of $400.00 USD back to the buyer inform of cash via western union as soon as possible and send us the full information received via the transfer. You can visit any western union center in your location and send the money or send via the online western union service to www.westernunion.com.Kindly get back to us with the information needed as soon as possible.You are highly secured. Thanks for your co-operation and your understanding."

This email got me a little more worried, because I definitely did not owe anyone $400. Another clue that this could have been a scam was that this was definitely not written by a large company like Paypal.Readingit you can see a number of grammatical and spelling errors, which I believed would not come from a large company.

Another thing that caught my attention was the western union reference for sending the money. I can't remember if I once read it on ebay's website or paypal's website but I remember reading someplace to not trust things asking for western union payments because they are not easy to track.

With all this looking fishy I wanted to contact paypal directly, Ididn't trust the emails I was getting from paypal were actually from paypal. One thing you can do in gmail and most other email services is view an emails source, which can show you a lot more detail of a message like ip addresses etc.

When I looked at the source for the email I got, I noticed under return path it listedonline.review@accountant.com. Which to me didn't look like an email from paypal. An email from a large company usually is something @company's name.com Since this email didn't say something@paypal.com.

With all this information I was pretty sure this was a scam. But I was still a little worried, cause I am not that technical with computers and wasn't sure if I could trust my theory on looking at the source of the email. There was still a small chance the email could have been from paypal so I of course wanted to be sure.
I did some final research and found out paypal has a nice fast way to check if someone is scamming you. If you receive an email that looks like it is from paypal, but you are suspicious of it, then forward the email tospoof@paypal.com by doing this you will forward the email to paypal and they will email you back before the end of the day letting you know if the email is actually from paypal or if it is fake.

The big things to remember is that you should always follow the terms of service for both ebay and paypal, should never trust anything requesting money via western union, and if you are fishy of an email check by forwarding it to spoof@paypal.com.Rememberalways be careful when dealing with money online!