So my sister of all people got her identity stolen. Someone had swiped her contact info along with her credit card information somehow. She theorizes that it was done when she made an online donation to the Darfour relief effort. She was lucky since she monitors her credit card activity quite frequently and noticed charges being made to porn sites. She called her credit card company up and they automatically refunded her the charges and closed the account. They said there were also two pending charges that they would follow up with, but it didn’t seem to be a big deal. She thought that was the end of it. But it wasn’t.
The “two pending charges” are apparently for an eBay listing this scammer had posted selling a used car that doesn’t exist.
Apparently someone else got scammed in the process of all of this. The same identity thief used her contact info to register an account on eBay and sold some unsuspecting guy 3 states away a car. He took the money and then gave the guy my sister’s contact info. So now he’s calling asking where his car is, and of course she doesn’t have it.
She immediately contacted eBay about it, and they said their “Investigations Department” would look into it. She has also contacted the local police department to file a report just to have everything documented. This is what inflames me about eBay, they’re a multi-billion dollar company, but what responsibility do they have to their customers when incidents like this happen? What are their duties in restitution?
eBay might be a blessing to some, but more and more, its becoming a big curse to most.
There was a story this morning on ABC’s Good Morning America about scams. Here are the 5 but you’ll probably want to go and read the whole story to get an in depth view of what each entails.