I wish to warn you of something that happened recently on Ebay.
A buyer from Poland bid and won on several of my Conan
RPG books and after the auction had ended he haggled over the shipping costs. It was my fault for that part in not realising that when combined the weight meant that the postage was going to be quite high. After some more to and fro I went low and was conceding that I would have to eat some of the costs.
So once I finally put the invoice through the buyer paid and then emailed me outside of Ebay giving a different address to official one.
Now up until that time something seemed off for me, the way he was conducting himself in the messages and despite the differences in language, something wasn't quite right.
So I google mapped the address he gave me and found that it was to a shopping plaza somewhere in the depths of Poland with no private dwelling, nothing. In fact the place was some considerable distance from his official Ebay address.
Further research of the guy's real name found that he was named after a small postage stamp sized town to the south of that country.
My bump of trouble went into overtime and so I googled Poland/ Ebay/ Fraud and came up with a lot of stories from people who had sent items to that country some with signed for stamps but they still got hit with a non delivery dispute and Ebay found for the buyer even though the seller had proof of tracking to hand. Some of them had been given requests to deliver to other places and sure enough, they got hit.
It did seem to me that the same thing was going to happen here; after all, the value (from a seller and collector perspective) of the package was very high including the post. So I cancelled the whole thing and refunded him. I firstly sent him a message stating that he was going to get refunded with an explanation of "difficulties in posting" since then I have heard nothing back, nothing at all.
Call me paranoid but when my bump of trouble is itching THAT much I usually listen to it.
So I guess that for sellers, when you get a request to post anywhere other than the official address given on Ebay, don't, cancel the whole deal. You might get hit with a neg or something but at the least you won't be out of pocket or full of rue and regret.
I also took the precautionary step of informing Ebay of all this so that if anything silly does happen they will at least have all the info at their finger tips.
I also want to take this opportunity to thank all those who bid on my stuff recently, I am now able to get things for my family this Christmas without having to worry about how I'm going to pay for them and the heating bills (its no fun being unemployed) Anyway, thank you one and all.
