Iphones on Ebay

Bryse Eayo

Now I'm not wondering about the $0.01 scams/schemes that always pop up on the first few pages, but are the deals for $200 8 gig iphones generally legit?

I'm in Canada and these looks like Canadian prices.... what's the catch here?

an_alt

It's a scam. This has been in the papers over the last month or so.

JohnnyCache

I don't know about a "scam" per se but there are some chinese knockoff iphone looking things out there - my boss bought one for shits and giggles and it actually fooled me for about 30 seconds.

Bryse Eayo

I'm looking at an auction like this.

Damn cheap for a normally $500 item.

Szechuanosaurus

For what it's worth, that auction looks about as legitimate as they get on Ebay. He has pretty small ratings for someone selling such high-priced goods, but then the professional scammers inflate their feedback with hundreds of fake positives (different from false positives, we're talking fraudulent positives here). Thing is, even if it's for a real iPhone at a believable price there's still no guarantee that it isn't a scam. Even if the seller was once legitimate, you can't discount the possibility that his account has been hijack and is now being used for fraud auctions. The fact that he has four auctions up for the same thing concerns me slightly. How did he get hold of so many unlocked iPhones and is able to sell them off cheap?

I would proceed with extreme caution, especially considering the sums involved. High priced items are the most common source of fraud auctions on eBay because it's easy to sucker greedy people in with the prmise of being able to save hundreds of dollars plus the pay-off is much higher for the effort involved in setting up or hijacking an account that will get locked down pretty quickly once eBay realises it's auctions are frauds.

vonPoonBurGer

Bryse Eayo wrote: »

I'm looking at an auction like this.

Damn cheap for a normally $500 item.

It's already up to $455 with over two hours to go, which means it'll probably push over $500 by the time the auction ends. And that should hardly come as a surprise.

onceling

Buying a phone from someone with 19 feedback isn't a great idea. Are they a scammer? Possibly not but you're increasing your risk unnecessarily.

I took about 20 minutes to check eBay for iPhones. There's none I would buy. I look for:

1. Feedback history that they have sold iPhones to satisfied customers for at least a couple of months.
2. Photos showing the real item not some manufacturers picture.
3. Must take PayPal.

I would never buy a cell phone on eBay anyway. I'm a huge, huge eBay shopper, don't get me wrong. Cell phones though? Not so much.