I’ve been selling on Ebay for A LONG TIME NOW and have seen almost every scam in the book from the bag of sand, USPS reroute, to the “wait 5.5 months to file ‘item never came'” scam. The most popular scam is the ‘this charge was not authorized’ scam which you almost always win if you show that you shipped it out to the person. However, a new scam that is popping up lately is the direct to credit card, “Seller shipped an empty box” scam. This affected me a few months ago when I sold an Oculus that was going to a dropship location in Delaware. Someone else in my Slack had a similar “empty box” scam with an Oculus to a dropship location as well.
The problem with the direct credit card chargeback is that the onus to win those are really hard. The banks love protecting their customers and will usually side with them. And even if you can show the package weight from USPS and FEDEX, you still may not win. And you can usually only upload one picture as your evidence back to the credit card company. At least when a scammer tries that scam through Ebay, you can usually appeal and call up Ebay and talk to a real person to plead your case. You can’t really do that with the credit card chargeback. I believe you can appeal to Ebay but your odds aren’t great.
I remember I had one person buy a pair of shoes from me. They were too small for them (they bought a size 8 or so.) They disputed with Ebay which I won. Then they filed a chargeback with their cc saying, “Item not as described. Wrong size blah blah and item was used (which it wasn’t.)” I then had to send pictures of the actual shoes that I sent that showed a size 8 (luckily I had another sz 8 pair on hand and I had saved their shipping label.) I then wrote something like, “Look, the person bought a size 8 and that’s what I sent.” Sure enough a few weeks later, the credit card sided with the buyer.
The lesson learned here is that you can’t really do anything with these credit card chargebacks. Ebay will tell you it’s the cost of doing business (no seriously, they told me that once.) I think I was just unlucky with the shoe chargeback. However, I think going forward, when selling electronics (like an Oculus) and it’s going to a drop ship location, I’m going to cancel the order and not take that risk. It seems it’s the international guys who know about this ’empty box’ scam.
I know photograph and post the photos of the item, package, and the item on the scale.
And as sellers we have no one protecting us. Do banks even keep track of how many times their customers file chargebacks!? PayPal has let me keep the money a few times even when customer went to the credit card company, as if PayPal went ahead and took the loss.
How do you know if something is going to a drop ship location? There are tons of them and usually it’s just in the person’s name and an address.
Drop ship locations will have a funky identifier in the address that’s not the usual name, house number, street, city, state and zip. Also google the address and it should be pretty easy to tell if this is a forwarding warehouse.