I recently got scammed on E-bay by someone. luckily I was one step ahead of the guy and didn't loose any money.
The guy was claiming to be selling a comlete system - Mirage G3, Sabre, cypress2 etc etc. The guy had complete specs of everything and pictures too. I won the auction for 800 quid (UK pounds) and was thrilled with the bargain!!
But there were a few things that made me wait before paying. i checked the address on google maps, and found his street address didn't exist,, he claimed to live in London but his postcode was liverpool.
In the person's feedback, there was one recent transaction where the seller had been given negative feedback, and the reply to it was 'my account got hacked!'
The guy INSISTED on A western union transfer which i refused to do, and offered to go all the way to London and pay him in cash.
His English was bad, from the sounds of it he was Nigerian, my dad works in Nigeria and deals with this kind of s**t on a day to day basis.
Also simple questions to do with skydiving he could not answer, like what company makes Sabres, and he could not name his local DZ or give his BPA number etc. On the BPA site you can cross check BPA numbers with names and dates of birth.
After a couple of days of the auction ending e-bay sent me a notification saying that this was a scam and the listing was removed, never heard from the guy again.
i suppose i was lucky the scammer was an idiot and didn't even have the skill to scam someone successfully. From now on, any transaction involving large amounts of money i will probably arrange to meet up for payment, but I suppose that's easier to do in a small place like the UK.
This is the only problem I've ever had on e-bay and it could have been a lot worse, but it is a lesson learnt, i am a lot more careful now.
One more thing, 'if it's too good to be true, it probably is'. Who would part with a rig as nice as that for such little money!