Protecting myself on eBay as a buyer

[Frog Sultan]

As a newb, I have very little experience with sellers on eBay. I have purchased 2 pins so far on eBay and plan on purchasing more but I worry after reading all the posts here of people who got counterfeit pins from sellers since I would have no idea what to look out for. The pins I bought were on their original backing cards and the sellers had 100% feed back. I assumed that was good enough. The pins are awesome, and I don't have any reason to doubt they are real but what should I be looking out for in the future? Where do I go to get info on people selling scrappers? What kind of give aways are there in their auctions that a newb should be paying attention to? Any advice for a rookie would be appreciated, including links to existing threads on this topic if it has already been beat to death and I just didn't find it in my search.

Thank you,

 

[vans4bkah]

Read. Read. Read. There are plenty of posts here where you can educate yourself. Welcome to the forum.

There are a lot of honest sellers here are on dpf.

 

[Jabberwocky]

Look at feedback. If it's less than 100%, run. If it's 100% and people still mention the word scrappers in the feedback, run. If they have sold multiples of the same pin, run. If they're using only stock photos and cannot provide individual pics of the front and back of a pin, run. If they're based in China, run. If they're selling only pins that all have scrapper warnings, run. If they're selling lots of "tradeable in the park" pins, run. Frankly, I wouldn't buy a pin lot no matter what promises a seller made.

That's a good beginning.

 

[starry_solo]

I don't think you need to necessarily run from "less than 100% feedback". You should read the negatives, why they were rated less than 100%. Sometimes their track record for being a buyer is "worse" than being a seller and sometimes they have bad experiences with other buyers or sellers. Just read the negatives to make sure.

 

[Frog Sultan]

Great advice everyone, thank you. I'll keep reading. Sounds like this topic has been discussed quite often.

 

[Molly]

The scary thing is that even sellers with 100% positive sell TONS of scrappers/fakes I think that people are happy to get good deals and either dont know or don't care that they are crap. The thing that should give you comfort is that even if they say no returns, if you get a pin that you know is a scrapper you can force them to take it back and issue a refund.

It has gotten so much worse lately as the pack of pin flippers seem to all want a piece of the scrapper action You should also be very wary of people on facebook offering to buy or trade pins that they tell you are scrappers. There is a well known pin shark whose wife offers people her "scrapper turn in program" where she basically lies to the newbie, tells them that their pin/pins are fake and then offers to send them an OE or HM pin in exchange for their perfectly good and usually rare or highly sought after pin.

Here is an example. The owner of this pin was told it was a "scrapper" and that if she would send it to this con artist, liar, thief and all around bad person, that they would send her get this "Authentic Hidden Mickey pins!" Thankfully the owner of the pin was smart enough to pass on that generous offer lol. She sent me this picture for reference. I can only imagine how many people have fallen for this scam and this person is a very well known pin shark who is now infamous for using their own as well as friends/neighbors kids as pin mules, even if that means sleeping on the Anaheim streets :nono:

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Be careful out there.