New eBay "scam"???
 

Here's the deal...with 6 minutes to go, the rims were 2 bids at $79. A last minute bidding war ensued between yours truly and "some other guy". I quit with a final bid of $151.92. I lost. Selling price; $154.XX

Here's the catch...within 30 minutes of the auction ending, I get a 2nd chance offer for my bid of $151.92.

Immediately, my gut told me this was a scam. My feeling is that the seller, working in cahoots with another entity, had their buddy do the bid war thing with me. This drove my bidding way up. Then the "other" bidder couldn't pay (preplanned), so I get the 2nd chance offer.

I realized that if I were selling something downstairs, my wife could be upstairs, engaged in the bid war.
She wins but "can't pay", so the 2nd highest bidder gets the "offer". To basically pay more than they wanted to. And I get top dollar with out having to pay to relist.

I know, the seller could have multiple items and just wants to unload them all, again without having to relist the item.

I did reply with what I thought would be a fair price for the rims, just in case.

But I'm dubious about the overall results thus far.

Your thoughts please...:)

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...MEWA:IT&ih=006

Hrmmmmm, hard to say, the winning bidder does have a perfect 208 feedback, maybe it is a legitimate mistake and he didn't realize how high he had bid.....

If my wife & I were running the "scam", it wouldn't have a negative effect on either one of us.
And the 2nd chance buyer is paying top dollar.

Hmmm, ...maybe I've just created a "MONSTER"!

Just bid and forget it. If you win youwin if not you pull some other iron out of the fire.

I'd "just say no" to a second chance offer post bidding war...

I'll bet he's got another pair.

Note: The following has been edited after learning more about 2nd chance offers. Yes, I was one of those that automatically assumed the offer was shady. Apparently it was not as ebay sanctions the practice if the seller has duplicate products to offer and completes the offer through ebay channels, as in this case.

There ARE other 2nd offer scams that you need to be aware of so one should read what ebay has to say about them...
http://pages.ebay.com/help/confidenc...nce-legit.html

The 30 minute thing is what would have done it for me as well...that's really odd. Although I looked at the bid history of the item and each of the bidders has different member dates, but it really doesn't give much more info than that. I don't know, it's odd, but I'd be real interested to see what the seller says regarding your offer. I don't think I'd buy from that seller personally.

:roflmao:

Hmmmm.....I was watching that one. Glad I stayed out of it!

This time last year a friend of mine lost out on a frame and got a second chance offer. He bit. He sent his $$ and never got the frame. Based on his communications with eBay, the second chance offer wasn't from the real seller and wasn't even an eBay seller. Everything looked like eBay, but it was just someone watching auctions and trying to scam auction losers with look-a-like pages.

Whether or not this particular seller is a scam artist or not, I'd pass up the second chance offer.

Tom

That type of scam is really simple to detect: if it doesn't show up on your "My eBay" page, it isn't legit. I find it hard to fathom folks who fall for that scam when it's so easy to tell if it's phony or not. If it shows up in my eBay, it's a legit second chance offer; the only issue here, in that case, is whether there was shill bidding going on.

I looked at the bids.

I've encountered this on Canon Camera stuff a lot in the past (just try getting a Montreal F- or a Los Angeles F-1). This is what i always do in such a case. I tell the seller that if the top bidder backed out than ALL of his bids are to be completely negated - that is erased from the list. Now we look at the new list and I offer to pay one bid increment over the next higher (losing) bid. In this case the next higher (losing bid) besides yours was the 118 so if the bid increment is 2.5 then I would offer $120.50. It works more often than not. unless you have a crooked seller on your hands.

Its not a new scam, its probably the oldest. On really desirable items I think its more and more rare for a "clean" auction without a party known to the seller or the seller themselves bidding it up. I rarely respond to second chance offers for this reason, I think it encourages the practice.

That's a good strategy, and it makes sense. The only caveat from a seller's perspective is that other bidders might have bid if the unscrupulous bidder hadn't, or others may have tried to bid, only to have their bid not register because it wasn't high enough. So I disagree that only a crooked seller wouldn't go along with what you propose - the seller may just have felt his auction was compromised. Also, it is perfectly legit, as I understand it, to offer another item identical to the one sold at auction, so a second chance offer doesn't automatically mean the high bidder backed out (or that there was a shill). I suspect that's the case with the auction in question. Might be worth asking the seller whether he's offering a second pair of rims identical to the first. You'll know eventually if that's the case when the buyer of the first set leaves feedback (assuming he or she does).

Been through one of these myself about two years ago- maybe they're coming back around...
the second chance offer was definitely not from the real seller- I kept with it for a while to get as much info before reporting without giving up any info of my own... googled payment address- it was some shady address of a import/export company

beware

I picked up a nice pair of Sugoi shorts on a 2nd Offer. Don't know if the guy shilled too high or if he had multiple pairs but it worked out. If it's from the seller there should be a copy of the message in your My Messages area of your My eBay page. If it's not there stay away.


:beer:

+1, notice they are in the package. Possibly could have more than one set. There are a few sellers that do this. I know that at times I have had a couple of the same items and have offered the loosing buyer a second one. Especially when the bidding goes way up. The logic behind that is someone will eventually see how much I sold mine for and will put up a set of their own. Each time driving the price down. The sooner you 'second chance offer' the more likely you will be to get a better price.

Could be a scam, but playing the underdog card from personal experience.

[edit] Also look at the seller's feedback. He has sold these before (has multiple sets). AND both the seller and the buyer have a pretty healthy feedback, and looks like they have not dealt with each other in the past. There is def. a scam like this going around ebay, but I would wager that your particular situation was legit.

All logical except that if one places a bid higher than the "current" bid" it will register, but won't become the "high bid" unless it's higher than the other bidders "maximum" The seller does not have to accept my counter-offer, but more often than not they do.

You might have noticed that if the bidding goes over 200 or the "reserve" is set over 200 than all bidder ids are hidden now. The prior remark about checking for it in my ebay is entirely correct, I would only consider a second chance offer that i saw in my ebay. I've bought a boatload of Canon camera equipment on ebay - and have only gotten really burned once and I made that seller pay in the end because i used a credit card and wrote my bank to have it reversed. Paypal slapped him with a chargeback fee on top of it all!

[QUOTE=mikepoole;5197332]Been through one of these myself about two years ago- maybe they're coming back around...
the second chance offer was definitely not from the real seller- I kept with it for a while to get as much info before reporting without giving up any info of my own... googled payment address- it was some shady address of a import/export company

beware[/QUOTE}

It's really hard to run this scam now, because:
1. On auctions over a certain amount (usually $200), the identities of under bidders are not made available to anyone other than the seller, and
2. eBay has cut down on the ability of anyone other than the seller to contact bidders through eBay. I encountered this recently when I went to contact a member and was told I couldn't as I didn't have any recent or open transactions with that member. I also found that as a seller, I can no longer send more than one response to a question about my item. I used to always send a quick message and say, "I'll get the answer to your question and get back to you ASAP," but discovered I now only get one shot at contacting someone who has posed a question. Frankly, eBay is getting increasingly stressful for both buyers and sellers.
So don't respond to anyone who hasn't contacted you through eBay, and you can't get second-chance scammed, though you can encounter a seller using a shill.
And I will say that there are still lots of scrupulous eBay sellers of vintage bike items out there, saying that "clean" auctions for desirable items are "rare" is just way overstated and unfair.

Except in cases where the non-legit bidder or the underbidder snipe. In that case, someone may have clicked to place a bid, then gone to enter it, only to be informed they needed to enter a higher amount base on someone having entered a new bid since they clicked on "place bid." They get a message saying "the following must be corrected before continuing."
So let's say it's the last minute, and I go to place a bid. I enter the amount. Meanwhile, you enter a new bid higher than mine, but you're not the high bidder, because a shill has outbid you. I click "submit" and am told I need to enter a higher amount. My bid doesn't register; yours does, though you're not the high bidder. Take out the shill's bid, and the next highest official, registered bid would go to "Bill," who bid less than I was willing to bid. My bid would have registered if the shill hadn't bid. If the seller accepts your offer of one increment over what that Bill bid, he loses money, as sans shill, my bid would have been second-highest, not Bill's.

Well the 2nd chance offer IS through eBay and seems legit.

SOoooo...my next question..

Are those rims really WORTH almost $200 w/shipping???

I thought my NOS Regina 5 speed freewheel for $125 was kind of ridiculous, but this....:p

I did what CadilacMike said, and sent a counter "offer". The amount being my bid BEFORE I upped it to $151.
For $186, I'll have to sleep on it. (with my fingers crossed) :rolleyes:

Anyway, thanks to all for the insightful replies!! :D
At least now I don't feel "scammed", just bewildered. :o

I guess it is time to list my NOS handbuilt 27 inch wheels.

I vote no.
You can score Mavic SSC's for that kind of coin.

In 27"??? ;)

I'm going to SELL all my "vintage" bikes, and buy me one of those cheap carbon fibre jobs! :p

I also received a second chance offer on an item (a Playmobil "Cycle Champions" :D toy set for my son's birthday). At first I was very skeptical, but it was legit as it was listed in MyEbay. But I still felt like I had been tricked into paying the high limit of my set price. I had to think about that a while...

If I wasn't willing to pay that amount in the first place (2nd chance or not) why did I bid that high in the first place? Would I have felt the same if I had "won" the item outright with the same high bid? Well, probably not. I would have been fist-pumping the air for having won in the last 15 seconds.

So, I had to admit that I was upset because I hadn't won outright, in fact, beat in the last 10 secs, and I complained loudly to my wife about automated bidding software, blah, blah, blah. I also felt duped when the 2nd chance offer arrived minutes later (the guy did in fact have more than one of the boxed set).

In the end, the lesson for myself is to never bid more than I am actually willing/happy to pay. If I get sniped in the last 10 sec, oh well. If I win outright or get a legit second chance offer, I'm happy.