How To Spot Ebay Fraud

I sell a few items here and there on Ebay, usually when I'm short of cash or feel the need to get rid of some junk. This month I'm just short of cash and with going on holiday in early October I thought it was time to raise some funds. After looking round my room I decided I no longer needed my MDA Vario as for me it has been the lamest phone ever.

By getting rid of the phone I no longer needed my GPS Receiver so I put both items on Ebay. I knew roughly the value of the GPS Receiver so I put that on with 'Buy It Now', the phone on the other hand I wasn't sure about so just listed that with a standard auction. The GPS Receiver went after a few days and the phone finished at a nice £97 on Sunday.

I was suspicious of the phone buyer almost immediately as the user had only joined Ebay in the past week and had no feedback. Second they did not try to pay until the following morning when I got this email:

I have pointed out various parts that made me even more suspicious:

1. The email has come from paypal.fundtransfer@inbox.com rather than service@paypal.com .

2. The header reveals more about the email not originating from Paypal.

3. Unusual characters showing that the fraudster cannot get the character encoding right.

4. I had been paid £10 more than needed in an attempt to get me to post it.

5. The ultimate give away was the frigtard trying to get me to post it to Nigeria. This country is renown for its '401' scams and fraud problems.

After logging into my Paypal account (not through a link in the email) there had been no payments and it was the final conclusion that someone was trying to make me a victim of fraud. I reported the incident to Ebay and they instructed me to file a none payment on the item however this can only be done after 7 days meaning I would have to wait that time then relist the item. So much for a quick sale.

I will most likely continue to use Ebay as I have not lost anything this time however this is only because I know what to look for and how to spot this kind of fraud. Perhaps Ebay needs to do more to protect its users, unfortunately I'm sure its not very simple.