Almost cheated!

It was time to buy a new mobile as I broke my P900. It had fallen several times but was going strong but this time around it refused to start up, may be it was too old and also ruggedly used.

So I decided to find myself a bargain on eBay. It was quite sometime since I had last traded on eBay. I was quite fascinated by Nokia N80 earlier when I was looking for a new contract so I decided to find a good deal on an unlocked N80. After a bit of digging around I found a deal.

I found the deal pretty good as the item was quoted as new and unlocked! In the item description, he mentioned he would prefer online payment for the item. eBay does say that is not safe and advices to use PayPal. But after looking at the positive feedback of the seller I somehow decided to take risk and chose the option to "buy it now". I received an email that I won the bid and it said I should send a bankers draft to the seller. I was thinking it would be online transfer, quick and easy. I sent an email back to seller why is he asking for bankers draft instead of online transfer. Also I was lazy to go to bank next day(Friday) to get a banker's draft. I decided to go to bank on Saturday but got up late and couldn't go. There was no reply from the seller, I was bit sceptical now and decided to look at the item I bought again. There is a surprise, the guy is not an eBay anymore! shocking! I was so close to being robbed by some one on ebay. I will always go with PayPal or something similar suggested by eBay from now on.

Just to check, I even sent an email to one of the guy who bought an item from the cheater and left a positive feedback but there was no reply from him as well although he was an active eBay member. May be he had made up the fake positive feedback!

Lessons learnt: Be careful and follow ebay guidelines :)