To Good to Be Trues on Fleabay

[RobertFontaine]

I have been quietly ordering hard drives at too good to be true prices.

The sellers have the exact same format: several for sale and a limit of 1 per buyer every 10 days.
They are shipping without providing tracking. The sellers of course have little or no selling history.

With 180 day buyers protection I can't see how I can lose on this silliness and the only thing that comes to mind is some kind of scam against the manufacturer warranty where they are somehow receiving or cross shipping replacement drives.

Am I missing out on anything obvious. The actual amount of cash involved is low enough not to matter much to me but it smells like a duck.

 

[Blinky 42]

Could also be outright stolen property they are trying to unload - the qty limits and lack of transparency in who they are used to make tracking them down harder and keeps individual transactions below the monitoring thresholds, but if the cops do track it down eventually they will reclaim the stolen property and you are out the $ if beyond the 180 days (IANAL of course and varies by state, but had it happen to friends for items in the past).

 

[Silvas]

I'm fairly sure I got caught in one of these several years back. I did try contacting the police, ebay, paypal, and newegg but they all either told me to call someone else or told me it wasn't worth their time and as I wasn't the 'victim' I couldn't file a complaint.
Basically it goes like this:
The crooks get ahold of a stolen credit card or compromised account.
List items on ebay. Sell items.
Order items online with compromised CC, ship to buyer.
Buyer gets their items, thinks nothing of it. Seller gets money. CC owner either never notices and pays the bill, or does a chargeback and it likely never gets fully investigated to where it gets back to the buyer.

The reason I believe I got caught in this, and how I found out:
I bought a PCIe 80gb RevoDrive back in the day on eBay for a pretty good price. Not horribly outrageous, but pretty good.
2 weeks go by, and I haven't gotten anything. No communication, no tracking number, no items. I would've contacted sooner but I was terribly busy with work and a crapload of overtime.
Contacted seller, got a response that they were sorry for the delay and they'd be shipping the item within the next couple days.
Auction seller and item location were listed as being Place A
Then I received a RevoDrive from Newegg. The invoice showed bill to name and address of Place B and ship to address Place D (my address)
Then I received a few days later a 2nd revodrive also from newegg. The invoice showed a bill to name and address of place C and ship to address of Place D.
This was, of course, *extremely* suspicious and squirrely. Newegg CS didn't seem to care as I wasn't the order placer. Paypal didn't seem to care as I wasn't disputing that I received what I was paying for. eBay didn't seem to care as the transaction completed and they charged their fees to the seller account (which was also likely compromised). The local police really didn't care as I wasn't the victim of the suspected CC theft, had no actual evidence of CC theft (just some extremely sketchy things going on, that I can't find any legit explanation for), and it didn't 'happen' in their jurisdiction.
I moved on and never heard another thing about it again. I wasn't out anything. Someone somewhere most assuredly was, but I made a best effort to do something about it and got shot down.

 

[BlueFox]

Triangulation fraud is still sadly pretty common with WD drives as they permit advance RMA.

 

[RobertFontaine]

Spent a couple of hours trying to understand credit fraud. It mostly gave me a headache. It seems like there are an infinite number of poor, unethical mostly stupid people willing to try the same 3 scams until they are arrested. The idea that this is "organized crime" leaves me a bit perplexed. It appears extremely disorganized to me.

 

[Terry Kennedy]

Auction seller and item location were listed as being Place A
Then I received a RevoDrive from Newegg. The invoice showed bill to name and address of Place B and ship to address Place D (my address).

This sort of thing used to happen legitimately (and outside of eBay). You'd place an order with a company that listed an item as "lead time: 2-3 days" at a good price. The seller, who had an account and was a legitimate customer of a distributor like Tech Data, would send the order to Tech Data as a drop-ship with the "omit source" (Tech Data) checkbox checked. You'd get the item, and the box would have a ship-from address you didn't recognize, and the packing list company name would be "Your Shipper". These days, they have a more sophisticated system and can apply customer-provided logos, branding messages, etc. to labels and packing lists they generate.

BTW, this is how Amazon got started - having Ingram Book drop-ship books from their wholesale warehouses to Amazon customers. The only difference is that the labels and packing lists said Amazon (and had their original "A" logo).

 

[Silvas]

This sort of thing used to happen legitimately (and outside of eBay). You'd place an order with a company that listed an item as "lead time: 2-3 days" at a good price. The seller, who had an account and was a legitimate customer of a distributor like Tech Data, would send the order to Tech Data as a drop-ship with the "omit source" (Tech Data) checkbox checked. You'd get the item, and the box would have a ship-from address you didn't recognize, and the packing list company name would be "Your Shipper". These days, they have a more sophisticated system and can apply customer-provided logos, branding messages, etc. to labels and packing lists they generate.

BTW, this is how Amazon got started - having Ingram Book drop-ship books from their wholesale warehouses to Amazon customers. The only difference is that the labels and packing lists said Amazon (and had their original "A" logo).

Oh I know about that, but these were actually customer orders with newegg and included an invoice from newegg listing a bill to name and address. On each of the 2 packages I got from buying 1, they were residential addresses in 2 different states, 2 different names, both bought from newegg and shipped to me. There was no chance this was legit imo

 

[Silvas]

Spent a couple of hours trying to understand credit fraud. It mostly gave me a headache. It seems like there are an infinite number of poor, unethical mostly stupid people willing to try the same 3 scams until they are arrested. The idea that this is "organized crime" leaves me a bit perplexed. It appears extremely disorganized to me.

There is a lot of that going on, but there's also a lot of people who are pawns of organized crime groups. Mostly, but not all, foreign to the US. Malicious hacking groups or other organized crime gangs who recruit poor people who are desperate, don't know shit about how the world works and are gullible, or both. They'll either be honest about it being a stolen CC and we're just making money here, or they'll give them some song and dance about sell this stuff for us and go place these orders and we'll give you a credit card to pay for everything, and what you bring in, you keep x% and give the rest to us.
The other benefit is if the fraudster is not in the US, especially if they're in a country that has lax laws about fraud or no extradition treaty with the US, or where there are poor records and it'd be near impossible to find them... there's really no recourse. The US isn't even going to try to extradite someone for CC fraud unless it's a huge dollar amount, because it isn't worth the time and money to persue it.

 

[RobertFontaine]

I'm not sure if my avid use of flea-bay searches and bidding on TGTBT or my inconsistent use of my vpn has got my paypal suspended and an automated request for picture id, utilities receipts, and a disclaimer that I am not related to any politically sensitive individuals(wtf?).

13 years of paypal later they are checking my ID. lol. You might think the fact that my bank account is directly attached to my paypal account would give them a clue that I might be me.

 

[jammer45]

I usually stay away from these sellers, especially if their account doesn't have a good reputation or good reviews.

 

[T_Minus]

I'm not sure if my avid use of flea-bay searches and bidding on TGTBT or my inconsistent use of my vpn has got my paypal suspended and an automated request for picture id, utilities receipts, and a disclaimer that I am not related to any politically sensitive individuals(wtf?).

13 years of paypal later they are checking my ID. lol. You might think the fact that my bank account is directly attached to my paypal account would give them a clue that I might be me.

Probably the VPN throwing you around to different geo-locations, combined with a higher than normal complaint/chargeback on paypal/ebay??

 

[RobertFontaine]

Not sure, computer generated. Took 5 days to reinstate with pictures of id's and inane questions.