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

Your investment: money put on hold for a month with 0% interest and time spent filing a claim to reclaim it back when things go awry which is a no doubt in this case.
Your return: wasted time and money.
My advice: It's not worth the time and money.

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~!~!~".

Here's an update on this in case anyone is interested. First, his sales are now in the hundreds for each of the 7 items he's selling, and increasing quickly. He has 270 sales on one of the tablets, 170 on the PS Vita, 150 on the 3TB drive, etc etc. If you do the math you will see that he's made more than $15,000 already, and that's in only 24 hours that his listings have been active.

So, I've made it my mission to stop this guy. I was calling and sending emails to eBay and Paypal. Finally I got a rep on eBay who seemed to understand the issue. He said that he was going to report it to the correct person at eBay. He also said that the seller had reported to eBay that his account had been taken over and used by some unauthorized person. Most likely this is the scammer just trying to cover himself, after withdrawing the Paypal money he will claim that it was someone else that did it.

Anyway, I didn't do all this because of my $17, I know I'll get that back eventually. I just wanted to make sure that someone at eBay was made aware of these fraudulent listings so that they could be removed before hundreds more people are suckered in. I've since noticed that there are other Chinese sellers pulling the same scam, even using the same listing details. Ah well, I'll let someone else deal with that.

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~!~!~".




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.