How Scammers Exploit Online Marketplaces and How to Stay Safe
The Too-Good-to-Be-True Deal
You guys aren't going to believe the deal I just got: $800 for a brand-new RTX 4090 on eBay. Oh well, I guess it was too good to be true. But no worries—eBay, Amazon, and even AliExpress have robust buyer protection schemes that make it simple to get your money back if your product doesn't show up or isn't as advertised.
So the question then is, why are these scam listings still all over these platforms if they can't possibly work? I had to find out for myself. I hit "Buy It Now" on an obvious fake listing, and while it didn't happen exactly like we just showed, we did learn a ton about how scammers are operating on these platforms and how they could still get your money and leave you empty-handed. But it's totally avoidable.
How Scammers Operate
This topic originally came up on a popular tech show when a viewer pointed us to a listing and asked, "Hey, what gives with this?" And then, impulsively, I responded with, "I don't know. Let's order it and find out." Well, we didn't even get as far as placing our order before another helpful viewer reached out and laid out how they almost lost their money with a similar listing.
As it turns out, these scammers have found some ways to get valid tracking numbers without actually shipping you anything. We'll get to the "how" later, but what you need to know for now is they can just pick a tracking number that's going to your city and then give that to eBay or another marketplace seller to prove delivery, making it much more difficult for you to file a dispute.
But like, that shouldn't work, right? Well, whatever the reason for it, have you noticed how couriers give less and less information about a shipment these days? Forget about a zip code—you're lucky to even get an origin and destination city. And because eBay can't see the specifics of the tracking number that our scammer provides them, any delivery to roughly the same area in roughly the same time frame will make it seem like the seller has done their job. So, dispute closed. But here's the problem: you still don't have your GPU or your money.
What Can You Do?
Reaching out to the scammer is a waste of time. They already know it's a scam. You could try to escalate your dispute with eBay, but how do you prove that you didn't get your shipment? The tracking says you did, plain as day. Well, okay, how about the courier then? Surely, they can see that the tracking number has nothing to do with you. And they can, but that's actually a problem too because they're not supposed to give out information about shipments that seemingly have nothing to do with you.
And then, even if you do convince the courier's support representative that your story is true, eBay is going to want something tangible—not just an email from a meat-based chatbot. So what happened with our viewer then is they ended up having to physically go to the UPS store and convince an agent there to provide a note on UPS letterhead that stated that the tracking number that the seller provided was not associated with the buyer's address. Only when that was scanned and sent to eBay was a refund finally approved.
How Does the Scam Work?
In a nutshell, the scammer hopes that either you aren't persistent enough to go get that hard evidence or that the courier support team is too stubborn to give it to you. Now, I think that many of us would be pretty persistent when it comes to recovering that amount of money. But here's the thing: if a scam didn't work, nobody would be trying to pull it.
All right, that's the short version. But this scam didn't just pop fully formed into someone's brain. So how did we get here? Well, it's kind of a funny story because, get this, it didn't actually start out as a scam. Rather, it started as a clever way to deal with marketplace restrictions.
Online Marketplaces and Drop Shipping
Before we get into that, let's do a quick refresher on online marketplaces and drop shipping. I'm sure you've seen these little "sold by" notices when you shop on basically any major online retailer these days. Well, just like eBay, these sites are acting as marketplaces. The benefit for smaller sellers is it allows them to list and sell their items on large, recognizable brand-name stores in order to reach a wider customer base.
The benefit for the marketplace is they get a cut of every sale without needing to do inconvenient and costly things like maintaining inventory or, in some cases, even fulfilling the orders. This system allows just about anyone to list their product on, say, BestBuy.com. But hold on, they're going to need a warehouse and a logistics team, right? Nope. Thanks to drop shipping services, the seller can just give the marketplace a list of items and inventory that they have access to through third-party warehouses and then they wait for someone to place an order.
Quickly, they buy it from a supplier who packages it up, sticks the seller's logo on it (usually for an extra fee), and then ships the product to you. In these cases, neither the retail site that you used nor the seller ever even touched the product that they sold you.
How to Avoid Falling Victim
So then, what can you do to avoid falling victim to this scam? Well, step one is to exercise restraint before you yell, "Shut up and take my money." Take a breath. Really look at the listing. Is the price too low—like, unreasonably low? That's a red flag. Look at the seller. Do they have no or low feedback numbers? Red flag. What else are they selling? Nothing? Totally unrelated knick-knacks? Why are you even still looking at this? That's all the red flags you need.
You've got to ask yourself, what's more likely: that someone totally ignorant got their hands on a new-in-box 4090, realized it was worth money, signed up for a brand-new eBay account, and then listed it for maybe half of what it's worth, or that someone knows that a cheap 4090 is going to bring all the boys to the yard and that you should just yell, "That's my purse," and kick them in the plums?
Bottom line: be careful out there. The 50-series launch means that there are going to be plenty of perfectly trustworthy bros out there that are looking to upgrade and move their older cards onto new owners. And I'm a huge advocate for buying secondhand hardware to save money and selling it so that somebody can be using it. Just take your time, find a good deal—not a too-good-of-a-deal—and when you're done, take some time to check out our sponsor.
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