Re:Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With...
by mrep on Monday June 20, 2016 @08:27PM
(#11942695)
I lied, i have one more minor horror story with buying too. I bought my rMBP off of ebay for a pretty good price. A few months after I bought it, it stopped booting and would show a grey screen with a question mark on a folder (means there is no boot drive to load from). When I took it into the apple store, I found out that this laptop had been dropped right before I bought it and had to have like $1500 worth of repairs as it was having the same problem.
So not only do you have to worry about scammers, you have to deal with a market for lemons [1]. (Quite ironic now that I think about it as that is one of my favorite economic articles)
[1]: https://www.iei.liu.se/nek/730g83/artiklar/1.328833/AkerlofM...
Another lesson about ebay: Don't ever ship something to an address other than the one ebay has. My brother sold his phone and the guy asked him to ship it to "his daughter's house for a present". Turns out the account had been hacked and now he had just sent his phone to a scammer.
The last horror story i have: The same brother sold an iphone on ebay and the guy claimed it came with the screen cracked. Ebay sided with him on the return and my brother received a letter in return with nothing in it. Fortunately for him that time, ebay just let him keep the money and the scammer keep the phone (albeit, after 2 hours of arguing with their customer service).
TLDR: I've had way too terrible experiences on ebay to ever use them again.