New WD Elements SE USB 3.0 1TB 1T 1000GB 1000G 2.5" Portable External Hard Drive for $16.98 shipped from Hongkong

I'll tell you all exactly what will happen.

You order the product, shipping takes about a month, you finally get your item and it's not what was listed. In this case you'll get a 64 MB flash drive from 2004 so you think "oh flash drive, hard drive, I guess I understand how they could make a mistake."

You email the company and they will say "shipping error, we send correct item, please wait 3-5 weeks". About 2 months later you wonder where your item is. By then they have already scammed hundreds of others and are banned from eBay. So you go to PayPal to open a dispute. PayPal asks you why you waited so long to open the dispute, you explain, they tell you that the only way to get a refund is to return the item to the sender. It's not worth the shipping to send it back to China to an address that doesn't exist. Meanwhile the seller/scammer already has your money. PayPal locks their account after enough complaints, but guess what? They already took out their money, they don't care if the account is locked. The banks don't care in China and the scammer moves to his next location at another bank. The bank refuses to allow PayPal to withdraw the money from this closed account to reimburse the buyers. PayPal has no way of getting the money back and they sure as hell don't care about you, so they aren't going to take the loss. You think, but oh wait, my bank account/credit card will protect me because that's how my PayPal is funded! So you call them up, they refund you the money with no questions asked more or less. But who are they taking this money from? PayPal! PayPal doesn't like this, your account is locked and you're blocked until you refund them for that money that the credit card/bank refunded you.

So you just lost however much money you paid for your fake item, thinking you had nothing to lose and that "~!~!~PayPal will protect me~!~!~".

Quote from blowout : It looks to me like the guy is trying to cash out. If the "number sold" is accurate on his auctions, he's gonna have hundreds of sales from all of the items he has listed at $16.88. He'll make a few thousand bucks from Paypal, withdraw it and not even bother trying to send anything out. He'll lose his account but will already have his money. I sent an email to Paypal fraud dept letting them know about this seller. Hopefully they will do something about it. I'm not that concerned because I know I'll get my $17 back eventually, I just hate to see this jackass getting away with this kind of fraud. Actually, this guy is selling even more than I thought, and it looks like these auctions have been listed for less than a day(?) If these auctions are not taken down he's gonna be scamming eBay/Paypal for tens of thousands of dollars.

eBay/PayPal doesn't care, they aren't going to refund the money to the buyers. Hell, they will still get their fees from the scammer.