Against auction fraud

Auctions are a great place to sell or buy and for a vast majority of seller and buyers it's serves a real perpose since live online auctions are very popular. Sometimes things can go wrong and most people would believe it’s the buyer that’s most likely to get defrauded of his money on ebay. After all the buyer is mostly the one exposed to scams since he must pay at the end of the auction risking to never see any product arrive at his door. But sellers are commonly victims of scames. Here are a few common scams that sellers fall for every day.
The easiest scam sellers may be victims of is the “I Never Bought Anything” scam. A simple call to his credit card’s issuing bank to report that his card is being used fraudulently is all a buyer needs to do to reverse the credit purchase. The bank will, without investigation, reverse the transaction, often debiting the sellers account after the product has been shipped out. Online services like ebay and paypal will help protect the sellers from this type of scam. Providing all the detailes of the transaction to bank investigators is the only defense to this scam by allowing the sellers to prove the purchase was legitimate. Ebay also provides a deterrent by allowing the sellers reputation to be tarnished by the seller, victim of fraud, buy giving him the means to post negative feedback to the buyers ratings.
Bouncing checks have been going on for years. Here the buyer issues a check that won’t have the necessary funds to be covered by the buyer’s bank due to insufficient funds. It can take up to 2 weeks for a check to clear. The seller having sent the goods before the check cleared gets scammed only to realize later that the check bounced and the goods are gone. This scam is easilly avoidable by the seller who waits for the check to clear before shipping the merchandise. Some sellers refuse this type of payment and make it clear in the auction description.
Pay pal is an effective payment methode and one that is quit populare on the web not just eBay. Since all you need is an email and password to steal a PayPal accounts from an inexperienced users this is fairly commun. PayPal tries to protect against the frudulent use of accounts by offering a mailing address for each PayPal account that matches the one held by the credit card issuer. The scammer will try to get his goods shipped at a different address so you need to be causious of any atempts to shippe at a different address especcially if their willing to pay a higher price for overnight shipping. The danger or the seller here is that you may have your payments reversed from you once the fraude is discovered.
This certainly dosen’t cover all the potential buyer fraudes used on ebay but these are the most common and are the ones you can easilly get caugh with if you are too trust worty. When in doupt don’t hestate to communicate either the officials at eBay and PayPal and get some advice from them so you can limite the dammage cause by scammer, while at the same time continuing to deliver a quality service to your legitimate buyers.