You guys aren't going to believe the deal I just got. 800 bucks for a brand
new RTX 4090 on
eBay. Oh well, I guess it was too good
to be true. But no worries. eBay,
Amazon, even AliExpress, they've got robust buyer protection schemes that
make it simple to get your money back if your product doesn't show up or uh isn't
as advertised. So, the question then is,
why are these scam listings still all over these platforms if they can't
possibly work? I had to find out for myself. So, I hit buy it now on an
obvious fake listing. And well, it didn't happen exactly like we just
showed, but we did learn a ton about how
scammers are operating on these platforms and how they could still get
your money and leave you empty-handed. But it's totally avoidable with our
sponsor, Jawa. Four. I'm not a lionist.
Shaw is a legit marketplace for selling and buying PC parts like GPUs. Not only
do they have PC experts screening listings, but they also offer refunds
you receive a
brick. This topic originally came up on the WAN Show when a viewer pointed us to
this listing and asked, "Hey, what gives with this?" And then I impulsively
responded with, "I don't know. Let's order it and find out." Well, we didn't
even get as far as placing our order before another helpful viewer reached
out and laid out how they almost lost
their money with a similar listing. As it turns out, these scammers have found
some ways to get valid tracking numbers without actually shipping you anything.
We'll get to the how later, but what you need to know for now is they can just
pick a tracking number that's going to your city and then give that to eBay or
another marketplace seller to prove delivery, making it much more difficult
for you to file a dispute. But like, that shouldn't work, right? Well,
whatever the reason for it, have you noticed how couriers give less and less
information about a shipment these days? Forget about a zip code. You're lucky to
even get an origin and destination city. And because eBay can't see the specifics
of the tracking number that our scammer provides them, any delivery to roughly
the same area in roughly the same time frame will make it seem like the seller
has done their job. So, dispute closed.
But here's the problem. You still don't have your GPU or your money. So, what
can you do? Reaching out to the scammer is a waste of time. They already know
it's a scam and you could try to escalate your dispute with eBay, but how
do you prove that you didn't get your shipment? The tracking says you did,
plain as day. Well, okay. How about the courier then? Surely they can see that
the tracking number has nothing to do with you. And they can, but that's
actually a problem, too, because they're not supposed to give out information
about shipments that seemingly have nothing to do with you. And then even if
you do convince the courier's support representative that your story is true,
eBay is going to want something tangible, not just an email from a
meat-based chatbot. So what happened with our viewer then is they ended up
having to physically go to the UPS store and convince an agent there to provide a
note on UPS letterhead that stated that
the tracking number that the seller provided was not associated with the
buyer's address. Only when that was scanned and sent to eBay was a refund
finally approved. So, how does the scam work? Well, in a nutshell, the scammer
hopes that either you aren't persistent enough to go get that hard evidence or
that the courier support team is too stubborn to give it to you. Now, I think
that many of us would be pretty persistent when it comes to recovering
that amount of money. But here's the thing. If a scam didn't work, nobody
would be trying to pull it. All right, that's the short version. But this scam
didn't just pop fully formed into someone's brain. So, how did we get
here? Well, it's kind of a funny story because get this, it didn't actually
start out as a scam. Rather, it started as a clever way to deal with marketplace
restrictions. So, before we get into that, let's do a quick refresher on
online marketplaces and drop shipping. I'm sure you've seen these little sold
by notices when you shop on basically any major online retailer these days.
Well, just like eBay, these sites are acting as marketplaces. The benefit for
smaller sellers is it allows them to list and sell their items on large
recognizable brandame stores in order to reach a wider customer base. The benefit
for the marketplace is they get a cut of every sale without needing to do
inconvenient and costly things like maintaining inventory or in some cases
even fulfilling the orders. This system allows just about anyone to list their
product on, say, bestby.com. But hold on, they're going
to need a warehouse and a logistics team, right? Nope. Thanks to drop
shipping services, the seller can just give the marketplace a list of items and
inventory that they have access to through thirdparty warehouses, and then
they wait for someone to place an order, quickly buy it from a supplier who
packages it up, sticks the seller's logo on it, usually for an extra fee, and
then ships the product to you. In these cases, neither the retail site that you
used nor the seller ever even touched the product that they sold you. It is
nothing like buying from ltstore.com where you can check out our new Labs
collection and rest assured that we're involved in every step of the process
from design to ordering to warehousing to shipping to customer service. Sorry,
where was I? Oh, right. I'm sorry. Marketplaces. In spite of this lack of
control, marketplaces, they still want to keep their brand respectable. So,
they do take precautions to protect their customers. Like for example,
holding on to the money for a couple of weeks to ensure that the order actually
gets delivered or insisting that the seller provide a tracking number for the
shipment. And it's that last point that brings us finally to the tracking number
piece of the puzzle. See, no retailer likes to send you off platform. So when
you want to track your order, they like to pull the tracking details from the
courier's API and then wrap it up in their own pretty little interface. fall.
That means that they need to limit their sellers to the couriers that they have
integrated into their site. Now, sellers mostly played along at first, but as
marketplace fees have risen, sellers have felt the need to get more creative
to preserve their profitability. Say, for example, by using discount couriers
that their marketplace doesn't support. will. Somewhere along the line, someone
had the bright idea to use discount Joe's delivery, but then give the
marketplace a madeup string of numbers and hope that well, as long as the item
arrives, no one's going to notice or care. And that worked, at least for a
little while. But then the marketplace is wised up and they demanded that the
tracking number be valid. Okay, so now
our sellers need a more legit fake tracking number. How do they get it?
Well, a quick Google search shows how these numbers are formatted. And most
couriers will let you check dozens of tracking numbers at a time on their
website. Hundreds if you use their API. So, what if we just write a bot that
generates and then checks tracking numbers, logging any that work into a
database so that we can use them later? But Lionus, you say, writing that bot
could take dozens of minutes. If you've never heard of chat GPT, well, don't
worry. There's an even easier way. A quick search surfaced a wide selection
of professionallook websites that offer valid active tracking numbers for sale.
And I'm not talking about the dark web here, guys. This is plain old boring
internet. Let me show you. All I got to do is select a destination city. Let's
say Siri, Canada. I can specify an
approximate estimated delivery date range. Uh shipment status in transit.
And I want it to come from the States. I click get tracking number
and there it is. Origin Kernersville, US
um shipped yesterday. You can even pick details like the approximate weight of
the package if you want to get fancy. And that's it. We now have the tracking
number for someone else's shipment for the low low price of just 25 freedom
cents. Now, some of these sites claim
that you are trading tracking numbers, while others try to imply that your
actual shipment will totally be trackable with the number you're buying.
But in both cases, that is obviously complete These services are
all about tricking marketplaces. But the thing is, solving
this is not as simple as you'd think because the marketplace isn't the
shipper or the receiver. Even if they had someone on staff whose job it was to
check that everything lines up, the couriers wouldn't be at liberty to share
any information about a shipment that doesn't involve them. And let's be real,
even if the marketplace did notice the tracking was sus, what are they going to
do? They're going to email the seller and then wait for a response. A response
that will almost certainly be, "Oh, sorry about that. That was a mistake.
Let me get back to you with the right number." Well, that's going to buy Discount Joe at least a couple more days
to scooter up to your driveway with that egirl keyboard that you so desperately
need. At which point, everyone loses interest in the
investigation. But where are these fake
real tracking numbers coming from? Did these guys hire a guy on Fiverr to whip
up some of those bots we talked about? Well, maybe. But we also came across
another possibility while digging through eBay forum threads. Have you
ever used one of those third party tracking apps or websites to track your
shipments? You know the kind. They promise to track any parcel from any
courier, no matter how obscure, which saves you the arduous work of typing in
multiple three-letter domain names. Well, many of these sites are in
countries with, let's call them, loose data protections. And if you take the
time to peruse their terms and privacy policies, you'll find that they
generally do not consider tracking numbers to be personal or private
information. So, we've got these sites that are just slurping up active
tracking numbers all day, every day, keeping track of where they're going and
when. And we combine that with the market that happens to exist for valid
tracking numbers. And well, let's just say there's some synergies to leverage,
as they say. Now, to be clear, I don't have any hard evidence, and I'm not
saying that all of these tracking sites are selling data. I'm just saying that I
would be shocked if at least some of them weren't. And if they are, well, up
until this point, it isn't that bad of a
scam. It is dishonest and it completely
defeats the purpose of tracking, but most of the sellers that are buying
these tracking numbers really are shipping your product and you really
will get it eventually. They're just trying to jump through marketplace hoops
and ship from the most advantageous sources, most of them. But eventually,
someone realized that they could use those numbers to gain their metrics.
Let's say someone places an order for this here, this gaming mouse. After the
order comes through though, their supplier goes out of stock and they
can't get it. Well, marketplaces don't
take kindly to sellers who take orders that they can't fulfill. So, I'm in a
pickle. That is until I get an idea. An awful idea. A wonderful, awful idea. I
can avoid a strike on my account if I just buy one of those tracking numbers
and then just not actually ship anything. Then when the tracking says
delivered and the customer inevitably reaches out asking, "Hey, where's my
order?" I can say, "Oh, I'm so sorry.
The courier must have messed up. Well, don't worry. I'm already processing a
refund for you." At that point, as far as the marketplace is concerned, it's
the courier that screwed up. I'm off the hook. Well, once that little technique
spread around the drop shipping community, it was probably a matter of
minutes before someone thought of using it to just straight up scam people,
which brings us finally to my GPU here.
Now, I got lucky and they terminated this guy's account before he could
pretend to ship my order. That made it much easier for me to file a dispute and
get my money back. But it should be noted I still had to manually file my
dispute. and you might not be so lucky.
So then, what can you do to avoid falling victim to this scam? Well, step
one is to exercise restraint before you yell, "Shut up and take my money." Take
a breath. Really look at the listing. Is the price too low? Like unreasonably
low? That's a red flag. Look at the seller. Do they have no or low feedback
numbers? Red flag. What else are they selling? Nothing. Totally unrelated
knick-knacks. Why are you even still looking at this? That's all the red
flags you need. You got to ask yourself, what's more likely that someone totally
ignorant got their hands on a new Inbox 4090, realized it was worth money,
signed up for a brand new eBay account, and then listed it for maybe half of
what it's worth, or that someone knows
that a cheap 4090 is going to bring all the boys to the yard, and that you
should just yell, "That's my purse." and kick them in the plums. Bottom line, be
careful out there. The 50 series launch means that there are going to be plenty
of perfectly trustworthy bros out there that are looking to upgrade and move
their older cards onto new owners. And I'm a huge advocate for buying
secondhand hardware to save money and selling it so that somebody can be using
it. Just take your time, find a good
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pair at checkout today. If you guys
enjoyed this video, maybe check out the one we did on fake SSDs being sold on
Amazon. Why do people feel the need to scam each