OK, after years of shopping on EBay, mainly my DH does it, we have finally gotten taken. My husband is in the process of building a motorcycle, and he has been buying some parts off of Ebay. Like I said, he has bought a lot of stuff off of EBay in the last few years, and we’ve never had any problems – until now!

He bid on a set of wheels and tires for his bike, and was outbid on the auction. Well, a couple of days after the auction closed, he received an email with a Second Chance Offer, which is a legitimate EBay practice. After communicating with the seller, he said that he wanted the money sent to him via Western Union, because he was on vacation, but that his brother would be able to get the wheels packed up and shipped for him. That should have been our first clue I guess.

Well, we sent the money via Western Union, and DH emailed him with the confirmation number. The next day he emailed the seller to get the shipping information – no response. The next day he emailed him again. This time the email cam back as undeliverable because our email address was being blocked by the recipient. OK, that was a MAJOR red flag!

So last night, we were looking through the auction information, and DH notice that the guy that had the auction on EBay was the same person that he’d bought another item from. That’s when we noticed that the email addresses weren’t matching up. We requested his information from EBay, and called him. This guy told DH that the wheels had sold with the original auction and that he’d never sent a Second Chance Offer!! That’s when it all became clear that we’d been scammed. For almost $1000 dollars!! I just can’t believe it!

This guy somehow set up a bogus EBay email address, and made up the Second Chance Offer form to look just like EBay’s. Then he goes cruising through high dollar auctions that have closed and looks for people that have bid on these items, but not won the auction. This is a major security flaw with EBay, which I plan on bringing to their attention. Why should other bidders even be listed after an auction closes? That’s got the be some kind of privacy act violation.

Anyway, I have emailed EBay and PayPal. I used my PayPal debit card to fund the wire transfer, so I am praying to God that they offer some kind of buyer protection like most other credit card companies do. This whole situation has just made me sick! That’s a lot of money to lose! If anyone out there can offer any advice on how we can recoup the money, I would love to hear it!