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eBay Seller felipe949

My experience with this seller

Learn more: eBay Sellers "padding shipping charges"

I started eBaying when eBay was born -- almost literally the same day. In the old days, eBay was pretty good. I made a lot of money, and actually made some friends. As the years went by, eBayers got shittier and shittier, and so did eBay. Anyone who's been around eBay that long knows that is absolutely true.

After some years I gave up on eBay and canceled my account. Then, years later, I tried it again and found it to be even worse. Again I canceled my account. Then, years later-- you get the idea. Most of you have been through that cycle too. I've now had another eBay account for some years, but I don't like having it, because it makes me tempted to use it, and this way lies madness. It's nearly guaranteed to piss you off, and pretty frequently will rip you off. You have to be so careful now that it has become, actually, impossible to be careful enough. The scammers WILL find SOME angle through which to scam you. Just Google the problem.

eBay scammers are kind of divided into two categories:

(1) The out-and-out thieves, who will collect your money for an iPhone, then ship a stone of exactly the same weight. When you receive the stone, you're incensed, as you should be, and you contact eBay for help, and eBay contacts the seller who promptly sends in the shipping document showing that, really, he DID ship the iPhone -- just look at the weight on the shipping doc! You scream and curse back to eBay, and eBay says, well, there are lots of lying customers out there (and that's true), so how do we KNOW you received a stone and not an iPhone? You have no answer unless you video-taped the receipt of the box, and your opening of it. And who does that? I mean, except for me? Because I now do it. Religiously. And you should too. It should be an unbroken, never paused, continuous recording starting when the delivery truck rings the doorbell, including your signing, including carrying it into the house, and the unboxing, with as many witnesses in-frame as possible. THEN you MIGHT have recourse against the thief/seller, but it will be tedious and time-consuming and maddening. And STILL you might lose, because eBay has become just that irrational.

The other (2) kind of eBay scammer is the Goddamned little punk-turkey who thinks he (or she) is clever enough to rip you off, but to also stay just......barely within the eBay rules (and criminal law), and so, while still getting caught frequently, this type of scammer/thief can't really be sued or put in jail or knocked off eBay. There are more of those than the out-and-out thief types, and it is, or already has, ruined eBay and all other online selling venues. P.T. Barnum said there was a sucker born every minute. True enough. But there are a hundred scammers born every second too.

How do those barely-legal scammers work? Here's a classic and extremely common example:

The seller auctions, say, a pocket camera. It's a nice enough camera, about the size of a pack of Camels. The seller's feedback feedback looks mostly OK. You bid or you buy-it-now and you pay immediately -- but wow! You hadn't really looked closely at the shipping cost. A tiny camera that you just bought for $22 costs $43 to ship across the country by regular USPS priority? Really? The camera only cost $22. You're ticked, and rightly so. You go and look up the weight of the camera, and you go onto the USPS website and plug in the point of origin and the destination, and, and, the shipping for the same method is $12. WTH! WTF! What the Hell?!

You contact the seller, who already has your money and who CLAIMS the item has ALREADY shipped out and can't be canceled or returned (seriously-- he shipped it out in six minutes?!)(and be extra, extra wary of sellers who don't accept returns). And the seller says he only charged the ACTUAL shipping cost, which was $43. He doesn't know what shipping charge website YOU are looking at, but HIS USPS carrier charged him that staggering $43, so that's what he charged you. The end.

You send him a screen-print of the USPS website showing the real shipping rate of $12. He doesn't reply because he's already created a filter that sends anything from you straight into the forever-trash.

When the camera arrives, you can see the shipping charge stamped on the package (if the seller wasn't clever enough to tic the box to remove it when making the shipping label), and you can see that the seller only paid $12 and change to ship the item, just like the website quoted you, but he took your money in the amount of $43 and made a handy profit of $31 JUST ON SHIPPING! You take a picture of the package and the stamp and send it to the seller. But of course, he doesn't respond to that either, because he blocked you long ago. He doesn't care about you now; the only thing that will get his attention is a cop at his door and he knows that's not going to happen. The camera is more or less OK, probably not as nice as described but OK, so you can't claim straight-up fraud. eBay tells you you're out of luck because when you clicked BUY you agreed to the shipping terms. The seller has stuffed $31 extra into his pocket, well more than the price of the item, which he also made a profit on, and he's happy as hell.

But oh! Wait! You can file bad feedback against the seller!

Go ahead. It will roll off quickly enough, if eBay even allows it in the first place, and no one will know to watch out for the little jackass/punk in the future, so he'll do it again and again and again -- maybe thousands of times before he runs into a serious problem and must change accounts, but he'll have made numerous accounts years before, so dumping one that has come back to bite him is no big deal.

I'm convinced that eBay knows about the vast majority of these dirty pricks, but, honestly, if eBay culled all the scammer's accounts, would eBay have any sellers left? Yes. About eleven.

So is this REALLY a "scam"?

A "scam" refers to something that is dishonest and probably or possibly an actual criminal offense. What do sellers say when some irate buyer with clout actually gets a police officer to come to their apartment door in Des Moines? They say they had to buy a box, and they wanted compensation for taping it shut. In the amount of $31. Law enforcement then declares it a "civil matter", and washes their hands of it, and Mr. Scammer goes back to watching porn in his yellow-stained underwear and laughing about how stupid you were. Since physical assault is not PC Correct, especially across interstate lines, the seller is out of luck. They either go away from eBay, or they drastically curtail their eBay buying. And eBay seems to be too fucking stupid to care.

It's one thing when an eBay scammer (and that's what I call this shipping cost padding -- a scam, because at the very least it's horrendously dishonest) when an eBay scammer sticks it to a customer like this and then pulls a ghost-act. That will piss you off. It would piss off Gandhi. It would piss off the Pope. Maybe the Pope would pray for the scammer, but he'd secretly want to bash his face in and happily do the 90 days in County just for the satisfaction. Of course I can't REALLY speak for the Pope. I'm just guessing.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, I've been stung by these assholes a couple of times over the decades, and I'm now very, very careful when I think about clicking BUY or BID. I look at EVERYTHING. I happen to be stocking an underwater amusement park with dive gear in SE Asia right now, and so I am buying a LOT of dive gear from around the world, new and used. One item we needed was/is many copies of SCUBA Tank Backpacks. I snagged a quite a few off eBay, and bought many more new -- half of which had to be returned for being faulty. New SCUBA gear truly isn't what it was in 1970. Now it's very often rank junk.

In any case, I like old backpacks because they were built to last, and they do last, and they're safe, so that's what I look for on eBay, and I've found many with reasonable shipping costs to SE Asia, usually in the range of about $24-$32. For that price they've all come with international tracking, insurance, and arrived within about ten days, well packed and in perfect condition. Here are some examples, ALL of which are much heavier and bulkier than a bare backpack. (1000 "baht" is about $29 right now):

 

 

 

Above are just normal examples.

When I spied the item in the photo below, offered by eBay seller "felipe949", I figured I could use it. We still need probably 30 backpacks here. But I noticed the shipping had been "padded", based on all others I had bought, so I jotted a quick note to the seller advising him that I'd be happy to grab his backpack if he would charge only the true and real shipping charge. Easy enough. Maybe the overcharge was an "oversight" (yeah, right). He could look up the real charge, amend the auction appropriately (assuming the over-charge was a legitimate mistake), and we'd be off and running. Done deal.

He wrote back to say, "Can't".

Well, as a matter of FACT, sir, yes you CAN. Better to just say WON'T. I very politely pointed that out to him.

He replied with something smart ass.

I told him verbatim "Go away"; nothing more. Those two words only. I could see clearly what he was. I was done.

He replied with something more smart-assed again.

I told him to cease and desist or face an eBay complaint for harassment.

He replied even more smart-assedly, so I filed the complaint with eBay.

I see now his auction ended, unsold. Gee, I wonder why. Just not quite enough suckers in the world, I guess.

Note his shipping charge, for an item decidedly smaller and lighter than all the items shown above. No BCD included.

 

I unfortunately and against my will dealt on eBay a lot over the last year, trying to outfit this giant project. I hate eBay. As a buyer I hate many sellers. And as a seller, I hate many buyers. I use eBay only as a last, last resort. Shitty little jackasses like felipe949 are the reason why. I don't LIKE scammers, and I consider eBay's felipe949 to be A. SCAMMER. I don't like smart asses, smart mouths, and punks, and I consider him to be all three, in spades.

I haven't posted this little fucker's home address here because I don't want the deranged going to his house.

Let's see if there are more chapters to this story.

eBay, I suggest you find new ways to deal with this low level of seller, while you still have those 11 users left. Your ship is going down, --due to bad buyers and sellers, yes, but also due to your stunningly stupid and ineffectual ways of dealing with them.

More to follow?

We'll see.

 

Updates to be appended below: