|
Sensible Online Selling Safety Tips: Safe Ebay Way
Sponsored Links:
Have you ever tried selling your your personal stuff online at Ebay? The online marketplace is so vast and far reaching that just about anything is possible. To ensure that a real safe sale and not a scam is perpetrated is both the buyer and the seller's lookout and responsibility. The right attitude that a seller must adopt is one of extreme caution.
As you go into the vast online marketplace to sell your products, be extra careful not to give out sensitive personal and confidential information and exercise due diligence in appraising your prospect buyer before sending out your items for shipment.
Here are ten basic safety tips you must remember when selling items online:
1. Professional online scammers adore expensive stuff. They usually take time to search out expensive items posted at different online auction sites. So if the item you're selling is expensive, you can be sure that your email replies will surely be filled with more scam inquiries than real ones. As per my experience, I've yet to find a real and sincere buyer whose intention is to sincerely purchase the posted item. The ratio of scammers is about 9 out of 10 are fraudulent inquiries.
2. Most often by asking for a reply, these scammers will ask for your sensitive information such as name, address, contact phone numbers, etc. Never ever give out your sensitive information to strangers online. Personal information collected by these scammers may be used fraudulently without your knowledge and consent in some other dubious dealings online. Immediately volunteering your personal data also alerts these scammers that you are a possible and willing victim.
3. These scam inquirers will give you the impression that they have a sense of urgency in purchasing your item. This is to solicit your cooperation in expediting your action to assist them in their bidding. These could either be an urgent need to have the item shipped out to meet a short approaching deadline.
In cases where you will be overpaid via counterfeit money order or unfunded bank checks, they will even instruct you to refund them with a certain amount of excess money they paid you through Western Union. The best response is to simply ignore these urgent requests.
4. Another way to easily spot a scammer is their seeming propensity to use a publicly avilable generic email address that is easy to secure such as yahoo.com, fastermail.com. Since it is easy to secure multiple email addresses, they can alternately use these coorespondences to hide in different identities to make it difficult for them to be traced and monitored.
5. 100% of the time, a scammer will not give you their personal information. If he/she refuses to give you their real names, address and contact phone numbers, then you ccn be absolutely positive that they are genuine scammers out to scam you off of your merchandise. Since scammers are so protective of their personal information, all the more so you should be.
Never ever give out personal banking information such as credit card or debit card numbers,account numbers, names and addresses of your banks. Never send out blank forms electonically with your authentic signature on it, in real practice as is online, no one signs a blank document to give out to strangers.
6. The most common payment method these online scammers employ is the use of so called Western Union/Bid Pay Online Money Orders. They will volunteer payment procedures to entice the unsuspecting seller that they are "sincere" in making payment so as to later demand from you the immediate shipment of their item.
The scammers are quickly able to spot a willing victim if you immediately provide them with your personal information for purposes of money order placements. By responding to their demands, they literally have held "captives" their target victim which coiuld be you.
7. The most common form of Western Union Money Order advise are initiated with a fake email advise purportedly coming from Western Union complete with all the Western Union logos and trademarks. Don't be fooled by this.
Professional techie scammers usually have a ready pro-forma imitation Western Union email advise waiting to be sent out to unsuspecting victims complete with all lifted official logos, trademarks, and official links.
It's also easy to spot the authenticity of a purportedly Western Union advise. Just look at the scammer's URL identity details on the top part of the scammer's site and compare it with the URL site of your region's Western Union. Mostly, the scammer's URL site is fraudulently different and isn't in any way related to the real Western Union site.
Genuine Western Union Money Orders are normally issued with a MTCN (Money Tracking Control Number). So if you request for a Western Union Money Order payment advise for your item, make sure that you ask for the corresponding MTCN. This Money Tracking Control Number can even be verified for authencity online via the Western Union website which must also indicate the the real name, address, and contact phone number of the payor/issuer.
8. It also helps if you can contact the issuer's phone number to verify his identity as this will ensure that you can confirm the correctness of the supplied details which should definitely match with the shipping information.
Always remember that scammers need to do their scam in the shortest possible time it takes since timing is of the essence. This is the reason why the usual scenario of a scammer is to insist a sense of urgency for you to cooperate and give into their immediate demands.
9. Shipping out your item should be the last step of a legitimate transaction. To confirm safe arrival of your item, do keep a copy of the shipping document just in case the buyer denies having received the item. The amount of the item and related shipping costs must have already been received by you in whatever form of payment as agreed upon whether by PayPal or Western Union Money Order even before the act of actual shipment.
10. Finally you don't have any obligation to reply to all email inquiries that come your way. Multiple generic emails that don't indicate the complete true name and address of the sender are usually suspicious and up to no good. A sincere buyer at the start of the transaction would be more than willing to give out their personal information to ensure safe delivery unlike professional scammers who adamantly refuse to do so.
Go and sell your items online but take care to beware. Enjoy trading at Ebay , the safe way! If you had previous online scam experiences, please feel free to share with us underneath as you post your comments.
Sponsored Links:
|
04-28-2007, 05:15 PM
Linear Mode
Similar Threads