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Comment by lazyant | Hacker News Reader

> I wonder how many items he had to sell before

"The seller had one good review but didn’t appear to be selling anything else." so it looks like maybe just one item

eBay fraudsters mastered this. They would buy and sell bullshit items like old postcards that would be shippable via first class mail, then wait a few months for the auction listings to expire, than sell a fake laptop or camera.

I was almost defrauded like this but refused the shipment and was able to claw the money back via chargeback at the cost of my PayPal account. With about 15 minutes of searching I was able to find networks of these phony sellers building up eBay points and running these scams.

I remember there was an issue where you couldn't easily see a seller's recently sold items, only currently listed and items with feedback already received. So you couldn't see that this well-reviewed person selling an Xbox for a suspiciously low price just sold 30 other Xboxes in the past 48 hours.

Probably has many alts.

You would need a credit card for each. Maybe they purchased fraudulent cards or this is the first of many scams on that account.

There are virtual credit card services around, don't think amazon managed to ban them all

The same credit card can't be added to multiple accounts? Are you sure?

I'm not sure if you could or not, however if you were a scammer, you would probably not duplicate cards across accounts. If one account was banned, they would likely ban all accounts with same credit card, thereby wasting all that effort to starting multiple accounts.

I actually tried that last week. It seemed to work at first, but a couple of minutes after ordering they sent me an email that they blocked my (second) account due to suspicion of fraud, and invited me to FAX THEM (I'm not making this shit up) a bunch of documents, and they'd get back to me in a couple of weeks or so... Well, fuck you too.

No details for the fraud scoring given, of course, but I'm guessing the dup credit card combined with an overseas delivery address must have done the trick.

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