Trouble with eBay

A recent article in another section of the press set out to extol the advantages of trading on eBay. I have been an avid eBay buyer for the best part of six or seven years. I have bought paintings on eBay, books of all kinds, DVDs, photographic and DVD equipment et al, each time entering my bid and many times winning the item I had bid for. The system I use is to put in the maximum bid I wish to put on the item and just leave the rest in the laps of the gods.

Trying to outbid another bidder and competing for an item on eBay can be both costly and foolish. eBay will advise one if one is outbid, if the item has been won and even if for some reason the seller has transgressed some eBay conditions and the item is cancelled.

Three weeks or so ago I bid on a 60GB Ipod which I thought was moving nicely towards a reasonably priced conclusion. The seller was from China. I was duly notified by eBay that I had won the item. With the notification, a button appeared saying "Pay Now". Because the seller had already stated on the site that he only accepts bank to bank transfers and not Paypal, of which I am a satisfied member, I instructed by bank to make the transfer .

Soon after, eBay cancelled the item without giving a reason. My solicitations to get some kind of a response as to why the item had been cancelled after it had appeared in my "My eBay" as my "Won Item" brought me two successive long statements in German.

I returned each one with a request for an English translation. In the meantime, the seller, who had been most prolific with his or her answers to my e-mails before the bank transfer was made, suddenly stopped replying. That is one sure-fire sign, in these circumstances, that the buyer is in trouble.

My various e-mails to the eBay Fraud Prevention Group have been met with one stereotyped reply after another, each time from a different person, until I could put together a string of seven different people, each one telling me that they were not the police but I could contact the police of the State (US) where the seller comes from (www.usacops.com) and a mountain of irrelevant information which was simply an utter waste of time. Most of the time, what they were advising was that I settle the problem with the seller directly, ignoring the fact that each time I was telling them that the seller was no longer responding.

Since then I have seen another China seller cancelled on eBay - thankfully not one I was bidding on.

The Chinese seller who took my €227 and ran, in case you come across him or her, was listed as Ma Quiang, a client of the Bank of China, Beijing Branch.

I have since asked my bank to try to recover my money but the curt reply from the Bank of China was that the money had been posted to their client's account and that, if this was an eBay transaction, I should be more careful where I bid in future. That arrogant reply was the last thing I was expecting from an institution such as the Bank of China. It is not so much the money, although I would prefer to spend my Lm100 on something else. It is more the humiliation of having been treated like an idiot by someone still unaccustomed to the values of trust between people living in a civilised world.

The moral of the story is first that one should avoid, like the plague, sellers on eBay originating from China. The second lesson to be learned from this is that the eBay Fraud Prevention Group is a farce and one should not expect any help from them. At best they close the gate after the horses have bolted then direct you to another stable.