E-bay scam

bubbleandsqueak_2

My son was recently bidding on an e-bay item. He had bid up to £535 but was going away for the weekend, so he got my husband to carry on bidding. We lost out on the article by £1, but 3 days later we got an e-mail from e-bay saying 2nd chance, buyer failed, etc. As this was sent to our e-mail and we were the second lowest bidder it seemed genuine and certainly looked the biz. Couldn't find any fault with it. I forwarded it on to my son so he could fiddle around with at work, when guess what? Two hours later he receives the same e-mail to his e-mail address. Now as he dropped out of the bidding 2 days before the end of the auction at £300 lower than the final sale price, he shouldn't be offered a second chance, so bells start ringing. He manged to contact the original seller, who was stunned. He had successfully sold the item and had not posted an 'second-chance' therefore someone had hacked into his account. Had we not had bids out for this item on two separate e-bay accounts, there would have been no way we would have guessed this was not a genuine offer, and possibly passed over credit card details. E-bay were contacted, haven't got a clue what they are doing, but take this as a warning, we could have paid £850 into cyberspace.

frivolous_fay

These pop up quite regularly... well done for realising in time that it was a scam.

I believe genuine 2nd chance offers always appear in your my messages, so always check there. Look out for weird typos, or any errors that don't look quite right.

I don't think the seller was necessarily hacked - it could have been a 3rd party watching the auction who then sent the false offer through.