Alternative Auction Sites

AuctionAir

AuctionAir is a site I mentioned at AuctionCUT last March. It launched in 2001 and is a former project of British Airways. Unlike eBay, AuctionAir uses sealed bidding meaning you can not see how much other users are bidding completely eliminating the need to get involved in a bidding war. According to their website 1 in 7 users who placed a bid last year won an auction.

Telebid

A different auction model again, TeleBid offers mostly high value electrical items such as iPods, laptops and mobile phones all starting at 10p. It costs 50p to place a bid on any item, and with each bid placed the price of the auction increases by 7 or 10p. It does look like a fun site, but I imagine it’s easy to get carried away.

Competition

Our friends over at Power Sellers Forum are running a competition to design the best eBay template. The prize is being kept quiet at the moment, but it’s well worth entering especially as the template doesn’t have to be new. It can be one your already using on eBay & the competition is being judged by members of the forum. Details here.

These days, no one would ever think of John like this and he is known as a well respected eBay guru, author and powerseller. His ebooks have sold thousands of copies to date.

Mentorship Monthly offers an exclusive digital newsletter, audio and video training, recommendations and tools, personal help with your eBay auctions and the opportunity of question John on any eBay related subject. Content will be updated monthly & of course you can cancel at any time.

Payment is processed by Clickbank so if you try it and find it’s not for you it’s easy to cancel and get a refund within the first few weeks. You can find details at: http://www.mentorshipmonthly.com.

To make things worse, when the seller refused a refund and pretended he’d moved to Dubai – well what would you do?

This buyer took things into his own hands with results that have certainly backfired on the seller. He simply examined the contents of the hard drive and what he found was a little embarrassing to say the least.

And then, he published them on his blog for the whole world to see.

Absolutely hilarious, if you’ve ever had an item not as described on eBay you must see this.

Scam Backfires on eBay Seller

The best part is, it was all avoidable. The buyer has always said as soon as he gets a refund and an apology from the seller he’ll take the orginal blog down. In the meantime, I’m guessing we won’t be seeing Amir Massoud Tofangsazan around for a while.

Normally you’ll receive an email that claims to be from paypal or eBay, with the subject “Change your PayPal Account” or “Unauthorized Access: (Routing Code: P101-K455436GDT-Q-P090)” telling you someone has accessed your account or you have added another email address to your account. It then instructs you to log into your account, & confirm the changes made.

Normally in a state of panic, users try to log in to see what’s happened to there account – & they do this by clicking on the link within the email. This link though takes them directly to the spoofers website which captures your email address and password & sends them direct to the spoofer. As soon as this is done your account has been violated and they have access to your funds.

Some spoofers are very lazy, they send out the same emails again and again & don’t even setup the spoof website properly. As soon as you see the email you know for a fact it’s not a genuine email. But at the other end of the scale, some spoofers actually make the effort.

They add new emails, vary the subjects, & hide the url in the address bar so if you click on the link it reflects paypals genuine address. Some are even using emails from eBay, with titles such as Question from member regarding item #00000000 – if your an eBay seller you can easily be caught out by these emails.

Apart from reporting the spoof emails to paypal & ebay there was not a lot you could do with these emails. But recently I’ve found a new toy to play with these spoofers.

It’s called phishfighting – it should completly ruin most spoofing attempts almost immediatly.

“Phishers rely on the naivety of people to fall for their fake Paypal, eBay and banking websites. We can make the phisher’s life miserable by submitting 100′s or 1000′s of realistic looking, but fake, entries. The criminal won’t be able to distinguish between the ”Fake” entries and entries from real people who fall for the scam.” claims Phishfighting.com

Just leave it to run for a few minutes and you can see the false entries being submitted. Have fun.