If you use PayPal and ebay you will be covered by their guarantee and I have had to use it a couple of times on sellers with good accounts that got hacked and scammers took over their accounts. Fortunately, I was smart enough to catch on and notified eBay about it in advance. It's sped up the refund process. One trick I find is to ask for a phone call on eBay if you follow their help section. You usually can get them to call you within a couple of minutes and on the other end I have run into only English speaking customer service agents that have been very helpful. Never buy with anybody who doesn't have any feedback. Don't buy from people that have less than perfect feedback. If the images don't match up too well or look too professional has lots of questions. They'll usually slip up. If it's a buy it now price that is really low. You have to question yourself on why someone would put it at low of a price. Do the same. Ask a lot of questions before you buy it. Don't get fomo. Last week I lost out on a great deal because I was doing my due diligence and maybe went a little bit too far and actually asked for a video of it and asked quite a few bit of questions. During my investigation someone else bought it. I was okay with that because I have my process and I follow it and it keeps me safe. Be careful not to buy stuff outside of eBay. From sellers who want to do an off eBay transaction. Unless you're the one asking. Just make sure to always do goods and services so that you are protected. Also, the biggest one is do not deal with anyone outside of the United States. Don't buy or sell to anyone outside of the USA. Canada is like the 53rd State so it's okay.
When it comes from buying from forums, you got to make sure that that guy has decent feedback, score or make sure it's goods and services only. Buying off of you is not so bad because PayPal will have your back. Purchasing from someone else. Never do the friends and family thing no matter how good the person's feedback is. Or even if you know the person. What happens if you get a porch pirate or there's a train derailment and your package gets squished to hell. I actually had this happen. FedEx had my package on a train and there was a derailment and my package got turned into a pancake. It was covered by PayPal. Like somebody mentioned, getting money from FedEx is like trying to get money from the IRS. It is near next to impossible. You have to buy that insurance for sure and even then it's almost impossible to get it from them. The more safeguards you take the better of course, but always pay with PayPal. Got goods and services.
I And I like phone numbers and I like confirming information via text as a phone number. Can really track down a lot of people these days for information that you need to.
I have a little bit of a long story here, but I had to call a guy's mama.
I bought a product off of a Reddit forum for audio and video gear. The guy didn't have great feedback but I was the one buying from him. So I paid and it was PayPal goods and services. However, the guide disappeared and never shipped out my package. Towards the end of the week I got pissed off and I took the information from PayPal and track down the account using the email and it's churned out. He used his mama 's Paypal account. She had her name more or less on the email and I tracked it down doing search and it was a small City and so I searched for her name and got her address. Well it also gave me the other names of the people that lived at that address and the other person was the person who sold me the headphones. So I assumed that was his mama and I emailed her and she ended up calling me right away.. turns out her son likes to do this and she totally threw him under the bus. He was living with his dad now though and not under her roof. She gave me the number of his cell phone and the dad's cell phone. Well I called the kid, left a message and never got a return phone call. Next day I said watch this, I called the Papa and left a message. He called me back within 5 minutes saying his kid would never do something like that and the product was worth more and he gave it to his son as a gift for his birthday and I was a liar. He said his son was right there and he was going to verify all of this and how dare I accuse them. The son was there and said Dad let's call this guy back in a couple of minutes. I got to tell you something. Well the kid kind of made up a story in the meantime and dad called back and apologized for being difficult and said that his son would return the money right away. And sorry for the problem. The kid knew he was caught. Told Dad whatever he needed to in order not to get grounded or kicked out of the house. I thought that he learned his lesson that his mom read it about and his dad was ready too. Kill somebody just because he wanted a couple of extra bucks. He's lucky his dad didn't ring his neck cuz he sounded like one of those type of dads. So that was a fun story about a scammer. I got my money but it doesn't always work out that way. I have done close to 700 transactions but I've had probably about 10 times where I ran into bad situations. It's a law of averages. It's just like driving on a busy highway. Eventually you're going to get into a fender bender at some point. If you're on the road long enough somebody's going to give you a little bump. Hopefully the bump's not too bad and you're not too traumatized by it. Good luck to everyone and don't let the scammers win and scare you away. Just be more careful and do your due diligence and don't get too excited over cheap prices. Stay safe everyone.
