FraudTracking.com

Not so quiet on the Western Front.

We do not normally get many cases from USA buyers, but a new one has cropped up of interest. Due to the change in methods we see more often nowadays, we are especially interested in cases were buyers are using the eBay/PayPal system itself to perpertrate fraud against user of those sites.

Once we get our database/site back up and running you will be able to see our stats on the incidence of fraud from various countries.

A USA buyer, whose 112 eBay feedback rating would indicate a reputable eBayer, has reversed a $300+ transaction, apparently using his Bank to reverse the payment. This is not too unusual in itself, although an eBay/PayPal dispute would be the normal approach, but the shipment was to be from the United Kingdom and the reversal occured only 1 week after payment was made.

Further (according to the seller) it appears the seller notified the buyer that they were awaiting the withdraw of the PayPal funds to their bank account, before shipping, allegedly due to the high shipping cost involved for the purchase. As most of us know funds withdrawal from PayPal to a bank account takes up to a week so to reverse the funds after 7 days is very unusual.

So the situation as it stands so far is:

• Payment made to PayPal Sep 29th 2009
• Payment withdrawn to seller bank account Sep 29th 2009
• Payment arrives in sellers bank account Oct 5th 2009
• Payment reversed by buyers bank Oct 6th 2009
• Seller’s PayPal account goes into negative balance and is frozen

In this instance the seller is very lucky to have not shipped the goods, as the situation is highly suspicious and we would normally advise caution whenever a buyer acts in an unusual manner.

More info will be published, from the seller along with any response we get from the buyer, as we get it.

Username unavailable at this time

As was the policy on our main database site we will not name any suspect until the investigation has concluded and concluded in the seller’s favour. If it turns out to be a harmless mistake we will then be able to close the case anonymously.

Stay tuned

Argh

A database problem on our hosting for this blog resulted in our WordPress database having to be replaced, effectively losing all our previous posts. As it was a non-standard database for a place-holder website we did not have a backup.

If we manage to restore the historical posts we will. I typed the first one back in manually as we had a screen shot.

Thanks

Hi everyone,

I know we have been conspicuous by our absense, but we had to abandon our old hosting company.

Aside from the numerous techical issues, they kept overcharging for domains no longer registered with them (sometimes a year later!).

Anyway, we have a new hosting company that we really like with great features and even cheaper than our previous one. We should not have to worry about bandwidth limits any more.

This blog is a placeholder until the site is restored. Keep an eye out for it!

Thanks, Dave