eBay Nigeria Scam Exposed September 4, 2007
Posted by Andrew Wee in : ebay auctions , trackbackIt’s easy to focus on the $6 billion money train that is the eBay “digital marketplace” (or auction site in everyday language - “Internet Marketers, Are you on the eBay Money Train Yet?” But if you’re not careful, you could fall prey to scam artists.
With a worldwide audience, that set of Pez dispensers could evoke a fierce bidding war between collectors in Belgium and Thailand, and the tussle could boost your sale price quite substantially. But again, beware the sharks out there.
Last week, I put up a cell phone for auction on eBay and within 4 hours, a buyer took up the “Buy It Now” option, purchasing the phone at the price I specified. This certainly was a bright prospect for my eBay plans. What’s more I got a PayPal payment notification from the UK buyer, along with an email that read:
Hello,
I just sent the payment for the item. I also included
an estimated cost of shipping to Nigeria for my son
company. Please let me know when you get a
notification from ebay that Slong Girl sent you a
payment. Send me the tracking number via auspost as
soon as you ship the item. I am having difficulties
getting across to my son that manage her father
company over there. I gave his address to paypal for
verification and it has been confirmed so it should be
in the payment notification.
His correct mailing address again is:
Atolagbe Agbede
03 Ijaiye Road
Opp Mobil Filling Station
Ogba, Ikeja, Lagos
Nigeria 23401
Thanks and I hope to read from you as soon as possible
cos I want this to get to him at the shortest period
of time.
Slong,
girl
–
A UK buyer asking for a cell phone to be sent to Nigeria?
Plus the PayPal “payment notification” looked dubious. The payment amounts were all wrong and it came from “Services@Paypal.com” instead of the regular “service@paypal.com” (a hallmark of scam artists = poor spelling).
Even better, the email was sent from: “pp.notification.status@post.com” and “pp.notification1@gmail.com” - pretty poor email spoofing if you ask me.
-
As if these weren’t bad enough, the “bidder” had the audacity to send more fake email:
Dear andrew wee,
We hereby notify you of the transaction that was effected by Slong Girl for the
payment of the item(s) purchased from you on eBayand provide guidelines on how your funds
would be released.
A notification of this transaction on PayPal as been sent to you immediately the payment
was effected, and we are yet to read from you. Please be informed that the money has
been deducted from Slong Girl account and is pending on PayPal database.
This money will be released into your account as soon as the tracking number for the shipment
has been sent to us at pp.notification.status@mail.com for verification. You are adviced
to ship this item and send the tracking number you recieve from the post office to us at the
above email address.
We will send you an email as soon as the funds has been released into your account, until then
we wait for the tracking number for the shipment. Ship the Item to the address included in the
email used to you notify you of the payment for your item(s) ONLY!
Thank you using PayPal.
Chris Campbell
PP Email ID 936
This was sent from the same mail.com and gmail.com emails.
-
So the scam works in this way:
- They do a bait and switch on you: A US or UK eBay buyer will request for the item to be sent to Nigeria.
- They’ll mail you saying the payment is “held” pending shipment of the item and for you to send them the tracking number.
- If you fall for this, you’ll ship the item.
- They’ll disappear.
If you’re unsure, mail eBay’s customer service and get assistance.
Other telltale scam artist signs:
- The account was created a few hours or a few days ago
- Yours is the first item they have bought (they seem to like cell phones, PDAs and small electronic equipment they can presumably offload into the black market easily)
Checking the eBay site a day later, I found the person’s account had been suspended.
They are persistant though, here’s a followup email I received:
Hello,
I just sent the payment for the item. I also included
an estimated cost of shipping to Nigeria for my son
company. Please let me know when you get a
notification from ebay that Slong Girl sent you a
payment. Send me the tracking number via auspost as
soon as you ship the item. I am having difficulties
getting across to my son that manage her father
company over there. I gave his address to paypal for
verification and it has been confirmed so it should be
in the payment notification.
His correct mailing address again is:
Atolagbe Agbede
03 Ijaiye Road
Opp Mobil Filling Station
Ogba, Ikeja, Lagos
Nigeria 23401
Thanks and I hope to read from you as soon as possible
cos I want this to get to him at the shortest period
of time.
Slong,
girl
—
If you’re newer to eBay, do realize that the protocol is to receive payments BEFORE you ship items to the buyer.
PayPal provides some level of consumer protection for buyers, but you need to be savvy if you’re a seller.
-
If you’d like some resources to get you started, check out:
eBay Auction Success kit (free, pay only for shipping. Valid for US and Canada residents only)
Doba dropshippers (free trial, access more than 100,000 wholesale items, US residents only)
Popularity: 26%
Text Blog feed
That’s awful and extremely frustrating. Did you get your listing fee credited on eBay?
Yep, I got a credit.
At less than $1, even with all the bells and whistles, it won’t break the bank…
I take it more as a testing process, so I don’t take it as personally.
Hi, I have just been scammed by these same operators. A lady aparently in the UK named Deborah Bruce??? wishes to purchase my Samsung DVD camcorder. I sell for $585 she wishes to purchase for $800 and for me to post to Nigeria. on confirming yes… I will do this.. I then ask for payment. I then got a fake email from a supposed bank in the UK called Barclays - upon research I have discovered that they put the address wrong, and the bank email is bb-deposit@europe.com
The Bank “Barclays” says there policy is for me to send the item first and then when i give them my Tracking Number, they will then give me my money. What a load of Crap!!!!! So I am in the process of reporting this to ebay. Although I doubt anything will happen!!!!
Lucky I havent sent them the camcorder. Beware people!!!!!1
This below is a example of a scam I nearly got caught in today. Luckily for me I thought something was strange. I gave my paypal e-mail account Id, then later received a e-mail saying that paypal had received the money but it wouldn’t be released to me untill I got a shipping number and gave it to paypal. I just e-mailed the scammer telling them i no longer wish to sell them the item as I’m not sending it to Nigeria and will only sell in the U.K. It’s really bad people have to do this sort of thing, but I still have my Item and have no intention of sending it anywhere.
Dear seller,
This is to notify you that i have paid for your ebay item via paypal and my account has been debited, am sure paypal will have sent a confirmation to you, so i want you to pack the item very well and ship out first thing tomorrrow morning via Royal mail first class delivery to :
Name:Henry Olalekan
Address:10A,Ebunoluwa street,Onilekere
City:Ipaja
State:Lagos State
Country:Nigeria
Zip code:23401
And get back to paypal with the shipping reference number for payment verification. thanks
Ahh man that sucks. I got to say that I do not do much with Ebay but that looks so much slicker than this Nigerian stuff that gets into my inboxes. Other than the spelling though, if they could spell correctly their conversions my go thru the roof :)…
Still a load of crap but thanks for the heads up Andrew.
eBay can be a good avenue for lead generation, just a matter of sorting it out.
As one of the biggest sources of traffic, a smart affiliate or product owner will be able to get tons of leverage out of the system after some testing and refinement of their business system.
One of the reasons there are so many scams from Nigeria is because there is no treaty for dealing with this with the US.
Does Singapore have any agreements with Nigeria?
I haven’t checked, though what they’re doing is creating phantom accounts and disappearing.
Theoretically since the bid was made out of a eBay UK account, there’d be some recourse, but not if the person just disappears.
This was certainly a useful market test.
That’s terrible man, these people are just trying to scam people all around the place, not only on ebay, i think they are everywhere, in the mail, over the phone, sms, mail and etc. beware.
what some brunches of scam artists!
Andrew, would you mind If i quote your story on my blog or websites?
just to warn people be aware of those Nigerian scams!
thanks in advance
proson,
You are welcome to, and a link back to the original entry is appreciated.
BTW I don’t see the blog you are refering to, just a somewhat suspect link to some webhosting site you own…
well! what are bunches of scam artist! andrew can you tell me some easy methods to check on those spoof emails rather than go through all the mail header or things? I was a computer engineer and want to write some computer security articles to my readers.
thank you
It’s not clear why you double posted.
Surely, it’s not to get some cheap backlinks to your site…
That’s a surefire recipe to raise the ire and wrath of the blog owner and his/her blogging community.
You might do better with article submission, rather than blog commenting.
Hi,
You should go to quatloos.com and tell them about this scam. Quatloos is the home of Tony the Wonder LLama and a very large collection of notices of scams, ripoffs, etc. There is a large and ongoing section on the Nigerian 409 scams, which is similar to this, and a bit on the Spanish Prisoner scam, which this also resembles.
Some of the people over there have strung these scammers along for months and the posted exchanges are truly hilarious.
Barry
Thanks for the suggestion, although a casual check of Google shows that this blog post ranks for most of the keywords highlighted in the entry, so someone typing “Atolagbe Agbede” into google will see my entry within the top 5 results.
Stringing scammers: amusing to read, but I’d rather spend time building my business.
They attempted the same thing with us twice in 2 days on 2 different items we are selling, both we had as action items and buy now. We no longer offer buy it now and have blocked all international buyers (we live in Australia). We also forwarded on the spoof information to both ebay and pay pal who are investigating. Signs to look for include the ‘buyer’ signed up as a member of ebay that day!
There’s nothing to stop them registering an eBay AUS account and bidding on your account. You could set a min feedback to screen out bidders (and potentially some buyers…)
The scam is now running in Australia - ‘Monica Cerrg’ with a so called Northern Territory address but wanting items sent to a step sister in Nigeria immediately and offering extra money for the postage. Once again it was on an expensive ‘buy it now’ item.
G’day
I believe I am recently subjected to the exact same scam. He claimed that he is in the US requesting a tracking number for a mobile that he Imaginally paid for. Of course I did not release the item but even though I still got fed up at him for his persistance, seriously I was about to sent a letter of insults to his community to Lagos. I might still do that.
I am in Australia and a new user to ebay and I seriously need some advice on how to block buyers from Nigeria. Any recommendations??
Cheers mate
Min
They’d usually come at you from a US or UK registered account.
Rather than waste time playing with them, I’d report them to eBay, file for a credit refund on your listing fees and relist the item.
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No point wasting your time, might as well focusing on attaining your titanium powerseller or whichever bar you’ve set your eyes on.
This stuff happens thousands of times, you’d probably create the most benefit by authoring an eBay scam guide, writing your local paper, or posting in the forums about your experience.
Holy Cow! I was just looking up how much it costs to send something to Nigeria and I stumbled upon this article. This is exactly what they did to us!!! Sending it to Nigeria and putting the PayPal on hold until they get the item! (Except they wanted to buy it for their daughter, not their son.) I’m so happy I’ve read this, you saved me from losing $260! I knew their story sounded a little fishy and now I’m sure! Thank you thank you thank you thank you THANK YOU!!! We were JUST about to send it. You saved me and my family a whole lot a grief.
….once again, thank you!
These bloody scammers there all over the place now and are destroying all the positive aspects of e-bay. I was almost had last week, I got three buy it now offers from the same person (I suspect), at 2-3 times what I was asking. One wanted it for their son, the other for their niece and the other for their fiance. All shipped to Nigeria ofcourse. Two warning signs, one is spelling and grammar. Their syntax sucks. And two, i hate to be chauvinistic, is Nigeria. This should be one of the rules in the e bay terms of service agreement, “Thou shalt not buy, sell or correspond with anyone, anything or anybody that has anything to do with Nigeria”. Trade safe.
hi,
I just had the same kind of scam on ebay. I was selling a cell phone, and this guy sent me an email telling me to end the auction and he would pay extra if I send the phone to his son working for Unicef in Nigeria. I was doubtful, but when he said he was going to use Paypal, so I thought he is for real. But I was not 100% fell for his scam. I waited and played along. I replied his email, and he responded pretty well. A few emails from Paypal about the payment. I googled for ‘nigeria scam ebay’ just to make sure. Then I found your blog. That’s cool. Thanks for sharing your experience.
p/s They did a pretty good job on the paypal email, but they cant fool clever people like us. LOL
ideoteque
je viens d’etre victime du meme type d’arnaque mais ton site me confirme mon idee, maintenant je viens d’enlever mon annonce de ebay a cause de lui mais heureusement je n’ai pas envoyé l’objet (il s’agissait d’un pc portable dans mon cas, puis-je demander a ebay de me rembourser la somme d’insertion?
Hello, congratulations, yours is the first French comment I’ve received on my blog. (ok, maybe you’re the second).
It’s good you didn’t fall for the scam, and didn’t send the merchandise to the scammer.
You should file a listing fee refund request with eBay.
If the buyer’s account has been disabled, you should get your listing fees refunded immediately.
Thank you for your informations, i’ll do that. And congratulations for your blog the translation is so good that i thaught it was a french blog, but now i can answer in english
Thanks
merci beaucoup!
Nigeria isn’t listed on the paypal registration form so u have a few honest ppl trying to send gifts to their loved ones at home and scammers who have no choice but to choose another country different 4rm what they signed up to ebay with.
Let me tell you people should not say bad about Nigeria,i have been dealing with Nigeria for many years.
I have been buying and selling at ebay and i have been receiving my money.
Some Nigeria buying purchase one iphone and Laptop and he send me my money .
Dont say anything Bad about Nigeria.
Not all Nigeria are Bad and some are Good and it is all over the world some good people are good instead some are bad.
My ebay id:Blucas2000
I also got this scam. At first they not mentioned about their location, although i already asked for it 3 times. So i thought she was in my country. Then i asked for meet up to make all the transaction and she said she cant leave the office because she is a doctor. So we decide to make payment via PayPal. Finally tomorrow nite, she said that she already make the payment and asked me to check my inbox or “JUNKMAIL”. It’s weird right? then I asked my friend bout this matter. Thanks God i asked my friend, she said it’s absolutely a SCAM! Coz i never used PayPal before so i didnt know how it works. I almost ship the item, but luckily i didnt. Here’s the email:
Shipping Information
Shipping Info:
Name: Ifeoluwa John
Address: Block 56 Asiri Abo Street Odo Oba Molete>
City: Ibadan>
State: Oyo>
Country: Nigeria>
Post Code: 23402> > >
Shipping Method:
Address Status: confirmed
You have to provide us the tracking number to this item for verification of shipment and when this is done the money will credited into your account If you have questions about the shipping and tracking of your purchased item or service, please contact the customer care link memberscareteam@mail2consultant.com.
PayPal Email ID PP843
I’ve been trying to sell two iPhones on eBay and the auctions keep getting killed. How it works is this:
Item is bid on by three people:
A) Legit B) Legit C) Nigerian
The nigerian hikes the price and scares the others off. They “win” the bid. Then they claim their account was used without their authorization. eBay kills the auction. The Nigerian then writes you pretending to be eBay saying the auction is reestablished and that the Nigerian is authentic and it was a mistake. They then tell you to send your item and once the shipment is made, they will send your money.
So even if you don’t fall for it, you’ve still been victimized. They kill your auction. You can’t sell the item to the legit bidders.
In the original Star Wars, Obi Wan said:
“Mos Eisley spaceport: You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”
I think he was talking about eBay.