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Comment by kingnothing | Hacker News Reader

When World of Warcraft was released, I had the same thing happen to me. It was a hot item and my local retailer happened to have it on the shelves, so I bought 10 extra copies and sold the CD keys on ebay for about 3x retail pricing. Almost half of the keys I sold were allegedly bought from Paypal customers who "had their accounts hacked", so ebay withdrew the money from my account and refunded it to the buyers leaving me without merchandise or money.

Seriously: Fuck eBay.

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> bought 10 extra copies and sold the CD keys on ebay for about 3x retail pricing

> ebay withdrew the money from my account and refunded it to the buyers

Wicked karma :)

When Nexus 4 was launched, I ended up with multiple devices (automated parallel purchases). It gave a lot of joy to sell them at cost (on craigslist) rather than cancel my purchase or pocket the premium they could've fetched.

Karma? That's just good business sense. Buy low sell high.

I think of these practices as "Hoarding" & "Price Gouging" rather than business sense. More like taking advantage of people without adding any value to the trade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_gouging

Paypal/eBay give zero seller protection to anything not shipped with Delivery Confirmation (plus signature if > $250).

(Even with confirmation, they will still try to rip you off if the buyer balks. But you have zero chance without Delivery Confirmation.)

This is very common for digital items.

Because you need no postal address.

It's a easy way to turn stolen credit cards to money (or stolen Paypal accounts)

Someone tried the same arbitraging bitcoins on ebay and got burned.

Not totally sure this is eBays fault. I'd guess the actually were bought with stolen assets.

bought for 10, sold for 30, lost 12, profit 8. So, fuck eBay for only enabling you get 8 profit instead of 0?

Well, kingnohthing did nothing wrong and then got scammed, and lost plenty of legitimate arbitrage profit. Yes, eBay is lazy and doesn't check up who's it is siding with.

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