tried to send this earlier this morning to the WAMUG list but it
bounced twice due to strange happenings with my reply to address been
jiggered by our SMTP server (!?!?).....
In the end posted it direct to Jude but maybe others on the list may
be interested in it (slightly edited now to remove errors made in
making a hasty "don't do it Jude!" post)
This one is a long running Scam (well as long as the G5's have been
out and probably well longer than this)..... A friend who fell for a
similar sort of auction said what happened was that you had to
register to bid (auction is open only to "approved bidders") and then
they ask you for your credit card details before you start bidding so
that they can "ensure that payment is made by the winning bidder".
... of course you can see where this is heading ...... fortunately
my friend had a card which was maxed out so there was nothing left to
steal - when I spoke to her she realised how silly she had been and
immediately canceled the card.
this VERY G4 auction, compleat with same graphics and text, goes
around the different e-bay regions the last one I saw was a few
weeks back "based" in Italy.
I'm surprised it's stayed up there for as long as it has as e-bay
usually pulls these obvious (and repeat) scams within a couple of days
No bids are ever accepted - because they don't want a realistic
market price to drive away bargain hunters who might say "hey what
the heck!"
Their "high ratings" by other e-bay users are fabricated by a
conducting a multitude of fake auctions of small items with "buy now
at this price" options which are immediately "purchased" by a small
number of "buyers" who then post a multitude of glowing but
identical testimonials (even down to the same spelling and
grammatical mistakes), sometimes the process goes the other way round
with the holder of the auction "buying" a similar amount of similar
"goods" from a similar amount of "sellers" who give the similar
glowing "testimonial reviews".
At best they havest your e-mail for spam at worst it is outright
credit/ identity theft.
When things are too cheap to be good I would be cautious - there are a lot
of scams on ebay...
Andy
On 26/3/04 10:12 AM, "Jude" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi All
Slightly off topic, but is it 'safe' to buy things from Ebay? I just
noticed a dual 2gig G5 with 500 gig of 7200rpm drives, an apple 23
inch cinema display and all the other bells and whistles going for
$3800.
It has been up for seven days, has about six hours to go and has no bids on
it.
How do you know that you're not buying stolen goods? It sounds pretty
sus - I figure that combination to be more like $8000 worth.
Any good/bad/don't even think about it stories about Australian ebay?
cheers
Jude
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