We sell high priced items on E-Bay. Our acutions are "stolen" all the time, meaning someone will ake your auction complete with pictures and descriptions...the address in which to send the money is changed to theirs. They will usually run a 1 day auctiion and a buy it now price for 1/2 of the real auction. They hope someone will buy it and send THEM the money with no goods to ship. We get calls and E amils all the time telling us our auction has been stolen. When we call E Bay to report it, they tell us there is nothing they can do, they cannot take it down (they used to but their policy has changed for some reason). The pirates may be shut down after a while, but can easily get a new account and do it again. So a word to the wise...just be careful on what you bid on. Check to make sure the seller is established and has good feedback. That is the only way you can be sure.

After getting many similar emails from ebay (verified by spoof@ebay to be fraudulent emails), I downloaded the ebay toolbar. It turns red when you go to a paypal or ebay spoof page.

Thanks, Annabel, for that info. Two tales:

I once had a $3,500 item for sale on eBay and it showed up "pirated" on Craigslist, just as you described, everything from my eBay listing was lifted : text & photos. I had no idea until somebody used eBay's "Send a Question to Seller" feature to inform me. I contacted Craigslist and it was gone in about 20 minutes.

During the Olympics, I had a car listed for sale on Craigslist (it's free vs. the fees collected by eBay) and somebody emailed me as an interested buyer. As the story went on through a couple more emails, he was representing a buyer in Athens, Greece. Really? And the Olympics were on TV at that moment from Athens. Go figure!

He wanted to over-pay the amount for the car and wanted me to wire him the difference. Well, I already knew about this particular scam and told him to go forget himself. (I spelled it a little differently and he never contacted me again.)

TripleSecDelay, What is Craigslist?

That sounds familiar...I think that we got craiglisted a few times also. We have been on EBay for a long time and we have a lot of people that watch our stuff, so when something is pirated, someone tells us immediately.

Someone tried that scam on you too? I'll send you a check and you send me back the difference crap. Also, be very careful with credit card checks...there is a scam with those as well. We came across some other scams too, but cannot remember them.

People always think it's the person selling is the scammer...most times it is the person that wants your stuff is doing all the scamming.

Nothing beats the good old bank wires :)