PSA: I had a suspicious experience with latency2050 on eBay (sells M.2 SSD's, etc)

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ullbeking

Active Member
Jul 28, 2017
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London
There are some great deals on PM981 SSD's by vendor latency2050... on the surface. But lo! I was surprised... and something was fishy in the demeanour of the vendor.

I ordered a 2x 1 TB Toshiba NVMe SSD's. One was sent and arrived with no markings, stickers, etc, nothing!! Luckily I have a switched on colleague who received it and tested it for me in a server, and returned it on my behalf. It was actually an old PM951 with 512 GB capacity!

The other one was recalled before it ever got sent out.

In summary, avoid this deal, which is rotten in its core: SAMSUNG PM981 256GB PCIe NVMe SSD 250GB Solid State Drive - 2019 Model 3000mb/s | eBay

@ullbeking
 
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ServerSemi

Active Member
Jan 12, 2017
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So you bought one item and are calling this a scam? This doesnt look like a scam just a shipping error. It is really hard to keep a 100% feedback rating on ebay so maybe easy up on the accusations there is a lot of stuff behind the scenes as a seller ill give him/them the benefit of the doubt.

He’s also a top rated seller you have no idea how hard it is to achieve this with ebay. Relax you will get your money back
 
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Garon7349

New Member
Jan 27, 2022
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1
I had the same experience from Latency2050. Several issues I had:

Tracking number was invalid.
SSD was used and not new as listed (ran a S.M.A.R.T test)
SSD does not work
Wants the buyer to pay return shipping
Shipped from Florida and wants it returned to a California P.O. Box

observations:
Having negative reviews removed.
Accounts in multiple countries.
Uses a forwarding service to get mail delivered outside the country.

I found this website through a google search. I made an account to just post this. Hopefully I’m able to help.
 

compexvi

New Member
May 26, 2022
1
6
1
I purchased two drives from them recently. One was dead on arrival and they were combative and angry when I returned it. The second one failed after five months. Since their listing says they have a 5 year warranty, I politely contacted them about it. They blocked me.

If you're here, you probably already know latency2050 sucks. But if we can save you somehow: buy from someone else. They are bad people.
 

BoredSysadmin

Not affiliated with Maxell
Mar 2, 2019
1,050
437
83
I purchased two drives from them recently. One was dead on arrival and they were combative and angry when I returned it. The second one failed after five months. Since their listing says they have a 5 year warranty, I politely contacted them about it. They blocked me.

If you're here, you probably already know latency2050 sucks. But if we can save you somehow: buy from someone else. They are bad people.
again, I don't doubt that seller's shadiness, but how do explain 100% feedback? As mentioned above it's very hard to achieve and keep.
The vast majority of good sellers have 99% feedback because you can never make everyone happy.
 

WANg

Well-Known Member
Jun 10, 2018
1,302
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New York, NY
again, I don't doubt that seller's shadiness, but how do explain 100% feedback? As mentioned above it's very hard to achieve and keep.
The vast majority of good sellers have 99% feedback because you can never make everyone happy.
He has 10 revised feedbacks - the fact that he has 100% positive feedback is probably in itself a bit odd...no one is perfect, and if you read the reviews the seller left for others, he delibrately gave positive reviews to people that shouldn't, about 15-20% of his ratings as a buyer were from accounts that were unregistered (hacked and forced to close?) so who knows. The positive reviews might be puffed up from padding off affiliated accounts. so yeah, as for any purchasing experiences, your mileage may vary.

Screen Shot 2022-05-26 at 11.56.51 AM.png

eBay has a feedback period of less than 60 days, and 60 days are enough to extend wobbly hardware out past the initial honeymoon period.

Yeah, I would not buy from a seller like that.
 

Markess

Well-Known Member
May 19, 2018
1,146
761
113
Northern California
In my experience, so maybe not definitive, if the seller gives a refund (from some posts it looks like this seller did...grudgingly), then the buyer can't give any feedback. Its like the transaction never happened. So, maybe seller gives refunds only to people who give bad feedback?

eBay has a feedback period of less than 60 days, and 60 days are enough to extend wobbly hardware out past the initial honeymoon period.
And this ^^ ...especially if seller leads the buyer on a bit (I sent a new one...should be there soon....here's this [probably bogus] tracking number...etc.). Get past the feedback window and the scammer is golden.
 
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BoredSysadmin

Not affiliated with Maxell
Mar 2, 2019
1,050
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as usual, "if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is".
I agree 100% feedback at 5k transactions isn't realistic, even if the seller is genuinely honest and does everything right.
 

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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In my experience, so maybe not definitive, if the seller gives a refund (from some posts it looks like this seller did...grudgingly), then the buyer can't give any feedback. Its like the transaction never happened. So, maybe seller gives refunds only to people who give bad feedback?



And this ^^ ...especially if seller leads the buyer on a bit (I sent a new one...should be there soon....here's this [probably bogus] tracking number...etc.). Get past the feedback window and the scammer is golden.
In my experience it's more nuanced than that, if the buyer isn't happy they leave negative feedback and then request the return. If you return first you can't leave feedback. IF the negative feedback mentions anything about the seller (name\location\etc) that's grounds for feedback removal too, even if negative, and even if accurate. Additionally if the feedback is about the transaction itself (IE: Seller slow to ship) that will stay even if the seller refunds, where-as if you say "Item arrived broken" when you get your refund some ebay reps will allow removal of that feedback as you were compensated, and got the return of the item. They seem to be gaming the feedback system by doing refunds and thus removing negative feedback about the item itself. People need to leave feedback about the buying experience as I was told that's the buyers opinion and as long as you're not breaking rules that feedback will persist, and ebay won't remove it. There's also always the chance they have a rep they deal with all the time who's much more slack w\the rules on feedback cleaning :D
 

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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Good info! I always contacted the seller and got the return done first, which explains why I couldn't leave feedback.

On a pretty regular basis, I discover new stuff that @T_Minus knows TONS more about than I do. Guess I found another one! :p
I wonder if there's an ebay rep "playbook" for removing feedback :D That'd be an interesting one.

Unfortunately I've been on the selling side having to deal with false-claims from buyers :/ some things I guess we wish we didn't know so much about :confused:
 

BlueFox

Legendary Member Spam Hunter Extraordinaire
Oct 26, 2015
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again, I don't doubt that seller's shadiness, but how do explain 100% feedback? As mentioned above it's very hard to achieve and keep.
The vast majority of good sellers have 99% feedback because you can never make everyone happy.
I don't think 100% feedback is unrealistic. I personally have that and have been averaging a bit under 100 transactions as a seller annually over the past 5 years. My eBay account is now nearly 23 year old and I've never had a single negative or neutral feedback (and sellers could leave those for buyers back in the day too).

I'm aware of one other big eBay seller from this forum (BLinux) and they too are in the same boat. 100% positive with ~1750 feedback over the past year.
 

BLinux

cat lover server enthusiast
Jul 7, 2016
2,669
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artofserver.com
I'm aware of one other big eBay seller from this forum (BLinux) and they too are in the same boat. 100% positive with ~1750 feedback over the past year.
It hasn't always been 100% at all times. The percentage is based on the last 12 months. So negative feedbacks from over a year ago no longer count. I've had my share of negative feedbacks once in a while. 100% is hard earned though when you're doing thousands of transactions a year.... only about 40-50% of buyers leave feedback, so if you're aiming for 100%, you have to realize more than half your effort will never be recognized. Like someone mentioned above, it's hard to make all n-thousands of customers happy every single time. And if those facts discourages you from doing your best every single time, then you've already lost.

scammers on eBay go both ways, as T_Minus is alluding to. people make mistakes, even those who put in 100% effort and have the best of intentions. so feedback ratings don't tell the whole story. the easiest way, for me at least, to sniff out a scammer is via their communications. as a buyer, if you ask questions and you don't get any answers or get very generic responses that seem overly friendly but don't really answer your questions directly, that's a red flag. as a seller, if a buyer has a problem, and you reach out repeatedly to help and they don't respond, then I expect whatever they send back will be a problem (e.g., not what was sent out, a box of rocks, an empty box, etc.), and I have not been wrong about that once. in general, for low value items, say less than $1k, scammers are looking for the easy victims, not ones that they have to figure out how to lie to and try on their acting skills.

my "secret sauce", for whatever that's worth, is that I was an eBay buyer for many years before I was a seller. when I started selling, I basically wrote down everything I didn't like about my own buying experiences and told myself I would do the opposite of those. it sounds simple enough, but I had a long list LOL. it seems to be working so far, but things can change.
 

BlueFox

Legendary Member Spam Hunter Extraordinaire
Oct 26, 2015
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You're certainly doing better than me. My feedback rate is only about 25%. My personal experiences are that scammers tend to go for more consumer goods than server hardware, but I guess with your volume, you're going to see it occasionally too.

Only time I've had trouble on eBay was actually as a buyer (seller uploaded tracking number to my ZIP code, but clearly not me), but eBay reimbursed me for that in the end.
 
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name stolen

Member
Feb 20, 2018
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again, I don't doubt that seller's shadiness, but how do explain 100% feedback? As mentioned above it's very hard to achieve and keep.
The vast majority of good sellers have 99% feedback because you can never make everyone happy.
Ebay seems to be dropping negatives after a year, or at least making them invisible to current potential buyers, as well as not using old unshown negatives towards the feedback score. Yes, 100% positive can be difficult to maintain, but apparently not as damning as it used to be. I'm not 100% on the details, but it appears that you could receive a negative 366 days ago and be 100% positive today.
 

BlueFox

Legendary Member Spam Hunter Extraordinaire
Oct 26, 2015
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The feedback is still there and doesn't disappear. They only calculate the percentage based on transaction that occur in the past year. I can still see my feedback all the way to 1999. I can see why eBay would think that more recent feedback would be more relevant, but if someone has low volume and a bunch of negative feedback, it would be easy to spot.
 
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