You guys aren't gonna 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 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 you know who would never leave you empty handed?
Our sponsor.
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
and roughly the same timeframe 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 scammers 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 gonna want something tangible, not just an email from a neat 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's 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 dropshipping.
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 brand name 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, BestBuy.com.
But hold on, they're gonna need a warehouse and a logistics team, right?
Nope. Thanks to dropshipping services, the seller can just give the marketplace
a list of items and inventory that they have access to
through third-party 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 LTTstore.com,
where you can check out our new Labs collection and rest assured that we are 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 wanna keep their brand respectable,
so they do take precautions to protect their customers,
like for example, holding onto 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 wanna 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.
Well, 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. Well, somewhere along the line,
someone had the bright idea to use discount Joe's delivery,
but then give the marketplace a made-up string of numbers
and hope that, well, as long as the item arrives, no one's gonna 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 line is, 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 professional looking websites that offer valid active tracking numbers for sale.
I'm not talking about the dark web here, guys. This is plain old boring internet.
Let me show you. All I gotta do is select a destination city.
Let's say Surrey, Canada. I can specify an approximate estimated delivery date range,
shipment status in transit, and I want it to come from the States.
I click get tracking number and,
dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun. Dah!
There it is. Origin Kernersville US 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 bulls***.
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,
both carriers 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 gonna do? They're gonna 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 gonna buy discount, Joe,
at least a couple more days to scooter up to your driveway
with that e-girl 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 what's called a 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.
But 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 dropshipping community, it was probably a matter of minutes
before someone thought of using it to just straight up scan 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 the 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 knickknacks? Why are you even still looking at this?
That's all the red flags you need. You gotta ask yourself, what's more likely that someone totally ignorant
got their hands on a Newman box 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 gonna 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 deal.
Not too good of a deal. And when you're done,
take some time to check out our sponsor. If you guys enjoyed this video,
maybe check out the one we did on fake SSDs being sold on Amazon.
Why do people feel they need to scam each other?