After three years of buying and selling on eBay I finally got scammed. This issue is still pending so I’m not going to post any names (yet) but here’s the story.
I bought a 4GB USB flash RAM drive on eBay back in November. I’ve purchased these before with great success and great savings. Fortunately I had already read “BEWARE of Counterfeit USB Flash Drives“, an eBay Guide detailing problems on eBay with fake drives. So I already knew that there were a lot of fakes out there being sold, and I knew how to spot one.
IMPORTANT: If you do buy one of these devices the first thing to do is to write an amount of data to the drive equal to its capacity, and then read back the same data from the drive to another location on my PC to compare.
After writing about 2GB any further writes failed. And nothing at all could be read back.
So I contacted the seller, someone with a Feedback score of 140 and a Positive feedback of 96%, and requested a replacement due to defect. He was happy to do so.
About a week later the replacement arrived and – gasp – the same thing happened. Now I don’t want any replacement, I believe this guy is either knowingly or unknowingly selling crap. I requested an immediate complete refund.
“no probleme just return it and iwill issue a reund promptly thanks”
The piece of junk flash drive is now in the mail going back to Cleveland, OH.
Here’s my question: He’s been quick and courteous the entire time, even when I claimed his junk was a counterfeit. Assuming that I get a refund promptly what Feedback do I leave? Certainly not “Good”, but if he’s unknowingly selling crap should I leave a “Neutral”? If he’s knowingly selling crap then I’ll leave “Bad” Feedback”. There are no “Bad” comments anywhere in his Feedback, so am I the only one that’s received crap? Or is everyone else technically ignorant?
Something else – he used to sell a bunch of these drives, yet today it doesn’t look like he’s selling anything? As a matter of fact there is nobody from Ohio selling flash drives today. Has he switched identities to minimize bad feedback?
eBay, scam, USB, fake, flash drive, counterfeit
