If you emailed an eBay scammer ...

WARNING!
By contacting your 'seller' outside of eBay, you are in danger of being defrauded. The item/s you are interested in do not exist!

Scammers are hijacking eBay IDs all the time and listing thousands of non-existent items every day.

The scammers want you to contact them outside of eBay via an email address shown in the listing. Scammers never want you to use eBay's Ask the Seller a Question feature.

Scammers lure you to 'strike a deal' whereby they give you a fake invoice that looks as if it comes from eBay e.g. aw-confirm@ebay.com or transaction@ebay.com, but it is all bogus. They can do this with any Yahoo! Mail Plus account.

Scammers can even send you to a fake shipping or escrow site where your item is shown to be held. They then want you to pay via Western Union or Money Gram while you think your item is held by a 'trustworthy' third-party. Of course, once payment is made the scam is complete.

Do not be fooled! There is NO buyer protection whatsoever and you will have NO recourse through eBay.

Remember eBay's Marketplace Safety Tip:

Never pay for your eBay item through instant wire transfer services such as Western Union or MoneyGram. These payment methods are unsafe when paying someone you do not know. The fraudsters rely on you to pay via these unsafe methods so that they can stay anonymous.

I apologize for the 'full on' nature of the warning. Time is of the essence in some cases.

Please do not tip off your scammer as it may stop me getting more warnings out to others.

Stay safe.

A scambuster
and member of Team Whack a Hack

PS ~~ Please be aware that since you have revealed your email address to the thief, in days to come the scammer can send out fake 2nd Chance offers or fake eBay security emails to try and phish YOUR login details. Do not click on ANY links within their emails as they could send you to phishing sites. Always login to eBay from a trusted bookmark and check for the padlocked https:// secure address URL.