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 insaniak wrote:
He didn't say to rely on feedback. He said to look at selling history.

You're looking for a hstory of selling the same items, not what people had to say about it.

Exactly. If you see someone selling a single Warhound titan at 75% of retail price and their buying/selling history is a random mix of 40k models/MTG cards/etc it's probably just someone trying to turn a legitimate but unwanted kit into quick cash. If you see someone selling a Warhound titan at 75% of retail price with several more in-stock and their buying/selling history is a bunch of other FW kits at 75% of retail price then it's obviously a recaster.

 insaniak wrote:

 Yak9UT wrote:
The problem you will find with that is you will likely have sellers who don't have noticeably negative feedback. You Either have people who have no idea what Forgeworld models are like or people who don't care giving positive feedback.

So don't just rely on feedback. .

He didn't say to rely on feedback. He said to look at selling history.

You're looking for a hstory of selling the same items, not what people had to say about it.

Buying and Selling history spans back only a few months.

 Yak9UT wrote:
Buying and Selling history spans back only a few months.

But that's more than enough to tell if someone is a recaster. They aren't usually subtle about it, even a brief glance at their history and current items for sale is enough to spot that they're operating as a for-profit business selling multiple copies of kits at less than retail price, not a random person getting rid of a legitimate FW kit or two that they don't want anymore.

 insaniak wrote:

 Yak9UT wrote:
The problem you will find with that is you will likely have sellers who don't have noticeably negative feedback. You Either have people who have no idea what Forgeworld models are like or people who don't care giving positive feedback.

So don't just rely on feedback. .

He didn't say to rely on feedback. He said to look at selling history.

You're looking for a hstory of selling the same items, not what people had to say about it.

The guy that scammed me (and hundreds of other people) had over 100 sales (history) and a 99% positive feedback rating. Then he scammed the last 50 or so... made a new profile and keeps doing the same thing, over and over... beware; you might be one of the lucky first 100 to get a recast, or you might be won of the unlucky ones like me...
http://atticwars40k.blogspot.com/2014/07/ebay-scam-from-china-ack.html

 Gunzhard wrote:

 insaniak wrote:

 Yak9UT wrote:
The problem you will find with that is you will likely have sellers who don't have noticeably negative feedback. You Either have people who have no idea what Forgeworld models are like or people who don't care giving positive feedback.

So don't just rely on feedback. .

He didn't say to rely on feedback. He said to look at selling history.

You're looking for a hstory of selling the same items, not what people had to say about it.

The guy that scammed me (and hundreds of other people) had over 100 sales (history) and a 99% positive feedback rating. Then he scammed the last 50 or so... made a new profile and keeps doing the same thing, over and over... beware; you might be one of the lucky first 100 to get a recast, or you might be won of the unlucky ones like me...
http://atticwars40k.blogspot.com/2014/07/ebay-scam-from-china-ack.html

Wouldn't he get hammered on chargebacks doing that though?

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Wouldn't he get hammered on chargebacks doing that though?

Yeah, I really don't understand how this scam is supposed to work, especially now that the window for paypal disputes is even longer. It might work on a cheap sale where people might write off the loss instead of paying $20 in return shipping for the "accidental wrong order" to get a $10 refund, but these are expensive model kits even at recast prices. If he has to issue a refund every time he tries this "scam" he's just losing money every time on ebay and shipping fees, and accomplishing nothing more than screwing over the customer who has to pay return shipping. That's not a useful scam, it's just throwing away money so you can be a to people.

He doesn't issue anything... he takes the money and runs. PayPal/Ebay refunds the money.

Look it happened to me, and if you read the feedback during the last 10 days of his account to at least 50 other people when I last looked...

He just creates another account and does it again.

 Gunzhard wrote:
He doesn't issue anything... he takes the money and runs. PayPal/Ebay refunds the money.

And what do you think paypal does to the money that they receive? If the buyer files a dispute paypal holds the money until the dispute is resolved. And even if the money is released before the dispute is filed paypal can still come after the bank account or credit card that was attached to the paypal account. So the scammer would have to keep opening new bank accounts and/or credit cards for each scam and immediately closing them, something that should very quickly lead to no bank or credit card company being willing to take the risk of giving them another one.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Gunzhard wrote:
He doesn't issue anything... he takes the money and runs. PayPal/Ebay refunds the money.

And what do you think paypal does to the money that they receive? If the buyer files a dispute paypal holds the money until the dispute is resolved. And even if the money is released before the dispute is filed paypal can still come after the bank account or credit card that was attached to the paypal account. So the scammer would have to keep opening new bank accounts and/or credit cards for each scam and immediately closing them, something that should very quickly lead to no bank or credit card company being willing to take the risk of giving them another one.

Ok dude - it's impossible to scam on ebay I guess... it's not like you can't pull the money into an online account immediately or anything.

It happened - to me and a LOT of other angry folks - I read a lot of the feedback. The worst part however was that the EBAY customer reps have no idea what this stuff is or what it's supposed to look like.

How is an Ebay rep person supposed to know that the Heirophant Tyranid Bio-Titan is not the same size as the metal Space Marine I got, and that it wasn't just a simple mistake? ...they insisted I play the game of sending that crappy space marine all the way to China, waiting for that, then waiting to see if he says he received it etc etc... (that's why it works).

It was a real challenge all the way around. But hey whatever you know better - good luck.

Automatically Appended Next Post:
Heck even just finding a phone number for Ebay was near impossible. They use temporary numbers and they won't even hear your argument until a certain amount of days has passed.

 Gunzhard wrote:
Ok dude - it's impossible to scam on ebay I guess... it's not like you can't pull the money into an online account immediately or anything.

No, you can't. Paypal puts a hold on your money until 3-5 days after tracking shows that the buyer received the package, until that point you can't do anything with the money. And once you do take the money out paypal now has the bank account information that you sent the money to, and the paypal TOS gives them permission to make charges to that account to cover what you owe. So even if the buyer doesn't file an immediate dispute (which results in the money being held even longer) paypal is just going to take the money right back. And if you've already taken it out of the bank then guess what, you just overdrew your account, earned yourself a bunch of extra fees from your bank, and damaged your credit score.

And no, it isn't impossible to scam on ebay, it's impossible to scam with expensive items. If you want to scam people on ebay you do it with lots of cheap stuff so that the return shipping for the "mistake" costs more than the refund the buyer will be getting and they just write it off after leaving angry feedback. If you scam with something expensive all you're going to accomplish is seriously annoying somebody for a while until paypal corrects everything.

(It used to be semi-possible to scam if you could delay everything long enough that the paypal dispute window closed, but now it's long enough that you have no chance of success with that approach.)

I can say, as someone that went through this personally and spent many many many hours on the phone with ebay - you don't know what you're talking about.

Further what is your definition of an "expensive item"? ...is less than $300 (for a Heirophant Bio-Titan) expensive? - compared to what? ...you can buy cars on ebay.

I literally went through this, but if you want to keep arguing hah be my guest.

He sold a lot of items (recasts) and built up a history and positive feedback... then took lots of money, sent out garbage to stall the process and tanked that account, here were some of the feedbacks from the last few days of his account:

 Gunzhard wrote:
I can say, as someone that went through this personally and spent many many many hours on the phone with ebay - you don't know what you're talking about.

I'm not disputing that someone tried to scam you, I'm questioning whether they actually got any money out of it.

Further what is your definition of an "expensive item"? ...is less than $300 (for a Heirophant Bio-Titan) expensive? - compared to what? ...you can buy cars on ebay.

"Expensive" = "costs enough that I'm not going to just ignore the loss". If someone scams me for a $5 MTG card and return shipping for the $0.01 card they "accidentally" sent me instead is going to be $4 it's probably not dealing with all the trouble just to get a net refund of $1. I'll just leave negative feedback and move on. If someone tries to scam me with a $300 model kit there's no way I'm just going to forget about it and move on, I'm going to get my refund.

Do yourself a favor - first find a phone number for Ebay customer services (not easy) - and ask for yourself. I spoke to many levels of customer service / management and once they were finally convinced it was a scam, they were pretty sure that this dude ghosted with the money. Temporary online accounts are like - a thing dude, this isn't 1950; and he's in China.

But again it was so difficult just to convince Ebay that a metal Captain Sicarius is not just a "Simple mistake" for a Bio-Titan and that it was indeed a scam.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Gunzhard wrote:
Ok dude - it's impossible to scam on ebay I guess... it's not like you can't pull the money into an online account immediately or anything.

No, you can't. Paypal puts a hold on your money until 3-5 days after tracking shows that the buyer received the package, until that point you can't do anything with the money. And once you do take the money out paypal now has the bank account information that you sent the money to, and the paypal TOS gives them permission to make charges to that account to cover what you owe. So even if the buyer doesn't file an immediate dispute (which results in the money being held even longer) paypal is just going to take the money right back. And if you've already taken it out of the bank then guess what, you just overdrew your account, earned yourself a bunch of extra fees from your bank, and damaged your credit score.

And no, it isn't impossible to scam on ebay, it's impossible to scam with expensive items. If you want to scam people on ebay you do it with lots of cheap stuff so that the return shipping for the "mistake" costs more than the refund the buyer will be getting and they just write it off after leaving angry feedback. If you scam with something expensive all you're going to accomplish is seriously annoying somebody for a while until paypal corrects everything.

(It used to be semi-possible to scam if you could delay everything long enough that the paypal dispute window closed, but now it's long enough that you have no chance of success with that approach.)

Yes you can. You simply close the accounts down once the money has transferred. It has Happened to me before a few times.

Ok, we get it, there's a risk to be scammed. Which would be much less likely if you could just openly write about trustworthy recasters here, but that's another issue.
There's also a risk to get scammed with other ebay purchases and whatnot. People have pointed out that there are services that provide a good measure of security. Try to find someone more reliable next time I guess?

I've had a few disappointing busts on eBay with counterfeit FW. I always got something that looked great but was clearly made with cheap, substandard plastics that would warp over time. It's worse on Alibaba, where about 90% of the stuff you could want is fake.

Here's how to sort out cheap FW items on eBay.

1) If the price is too good to be true, it's a fake. There is no legitimate source of $129 Titans on the Interwebs, or even $300 ones.

2) If it originates from China or Russia, it's a fake. There's a good chance it's a poorly made fake that will prove to be unusable over time.

3) If it originates from non-EU parts of Europe, there's a good chance it's a fake. If there are photos of the item unpainted and it looks like FW resin, there's a chance it's not a fake. Consider the seller's reputation before you buy.

4) If it originates from the UK or North America, there's a good chance it's real so long as there's a realistic price. Unless it's painted to a high standard, you should not be paying full retail.