I wanted to hear stores of anyone has been scammed or almost scammed.
Back in 2013/14 I was buying a lot of base set packs. I really wanted a base set booster box in unlimited. And even though looking back they weren’t the price they are now. To 20 year old me they were expensive.
I was always too scared to buy one because I was terrified of a reseal. I did talk to some eBay sellers but never went through with it.
Wanted to see if anyone had similar stories
Sad thing is in this hobby I’m sure everyone who’s been involved for over a year has either been scammed or someone tried
One a less serious note; The first time I (almost) got scammed was over over 6 years ago and I have a funny story to share.
I bought a collection of Pokémon cards for roughly 200 dollars. Once I transferred the money, the seller, let’s call him John, deleted his Facebook profile and of course never shipped the cards.
After 3 days of trying to contact him, I found out his older sister’s name through Facebook and contacted her. While she didn’t do anything immediately, she got me in touch with their mother!
Needless to say, she apologies profusely and was not happy about the situation. He ended up shipping the cards the next day, and his mom still paid me my money back. And on top of that, I really enjoyed sticking it to him.
It was a good day indeed.
Woah! Was not expecting that ending. Glad it worked out in the end though!
Several times with easy resolutions through guaranteed buyer protection but it really depends on how risky of a deal you are comfortable with buying.
The biggest hassles Ive had were bait and switches. They posted a binder with WB creator cards shown on the second to last page mixed in, I bought for their asking price since it was a lot for the binder but low if it included those cards, and they conveniently switched them out with other cards of the same pokemon. Lots of photos of the listing versus what arrived allowed me to return it for a refund, as well as them cussing me out for the hassle on their end and I assume the lack of scamming that had been allowed to take place. Waste of time though.
Another similar was when I sold a booster box on US Mercari and they claimed the item was tampered, so they shipped it back for a return but what I received was a box of new towels (?). Best I can figure is that somewhere in the system a label was made or scanned in error and my package went elsewhere and I got someone elses. Either way, with plenty of pictures I got my money for the product and got to keep the towels. They were nice towels.
I mostly only do protected deals because it scares off most scammers. Currently had a guy trying to sell $1000 worth of cards for $300. He kept pushing it for a week or more until I told him I would only go through with it through paypal G&S, suddenly he stopped responding.
At least they were good towels!
Yeah it’s smart to do deals with buyer protection. Sorry to hear about the box and the binder. But at least they had you covered
Never. Wouldnt be smart since the cards i buy arent valuable and noone put into the effort if he has more than 50 IQ
When I bought my first German Base Set Booster Box 1. Edition for 4000€, another one on eBay came up for “buy it now” for 2900€. This was a time when a normal bank transfer was still possible via eBay. Since there was not that many sales data available at this time I thought this might be a good opportunity. I transfered the money and never received anything.
That hurts a lot!
I don’t think I know anyone in the hobby who hasn’t been a victim of a scam. I think it is quite common when people enter as beginners, especially in the first purchases, when it is easy to get scammed, especially with fake cards or with worse card status than advertised.
It has happened to me on several occasions, always with low amounts (below 200€) as a buyer. As a seller, luckily I haven’t had any problems yet.
When I started collecting again in late 2011/2012 I was obsessed with buying and opening a Base Set Booster Box. So I sold all of my Runescape gold to a guy for $1/million gold for 650 dollars. I bought the Base Set Box off of eBay for about 570 and then almost immediately got a chargeback through Paypal and the money was gone.
I lost all my Runescape gold and didn’t have the money to buy the box anymore. Luckily for me, the seller of the box was very understanding and cancelled the transaction with minimal fuss.
Like everyone who has spent any time in this hobby, I have been scammed a few times. So I will only go in depth on my most egregious story.
I was doing my normal eBay searching and found a listing for a 290/XY-P Ash-Greninja EX (a card that at the time was about $200-250, but now is almost $600-800 raw) that was listed for $60. The issue was that the picture used was a stock photo of the 218/XY-P Ash-Greninja EX, the difference between the two being a stamp with Ash on the 290/XY-P. So doing my diligence, I contacted the seller to clarify which version the card was, and ask for pictures. About a day later the seller gets back to my with pics, they say it is the 290/XY-P and the pictures back it up. No brainer then, I go ahead with the purchase and eagerly await one of my most wanted cards.
A few weeks later the package arrives, and what do I find? A 218/XY-P Ash-Greninja EX in maaaaybe MP condition…with a sticker of Ash on the sleeve. This was a while ago so I sadly still don’t have the picture, I opened a return ticket since I saw that they had it set up for seller pays return shipping. Immediate refund with no return, never hear a word from the seller. I can only assume they pulled pics from Mercari Japan or somewhere else I didn’t know about at the time, thinking this stupid American won’t know the difference.
Really the only bad experience I ever had with a Japanese seller, but even then, it was easy to deal with and got my money back pretty much instantly.
Luckily I wouldn’t say that I have ever been outright scammed. Sure I had packages that didn’t arrive, cards in worse condition than described or cards damaged during transit or in one case even stolen from the package (a 30 cent card btw so congratulations to whoever stole that…), but in 80% of the cases the sellers were very understanding and issued full or partial refunds themselves. In a handful of cases I had to get my refunds through Cardmarket / eBay support, but even in these cases I don’t think the sellers tried to scam me or anything they were just either inexperienced or very stubborn that they were in the right when they objectively were not. I did almost get scammed right when I started collecting more actively again in late 2019 / early 2020 though: When looking for good deals on vintage packs online I stumbled across a Dutch online store selling Crystal Guardians packs for a third of their market value, put them in the cart and filled out the details. Before I paid I thankfully decided to take a last look at the store before paying though and then realized that it was a typical fake shop and therefore didn’t do the purchase.
In late 2018/early 2019 I sold a PSA 9 shadowless Zapdos for $150 to someone on facebook and they opened a chargeback claiming unauthorized transaction with their bank. Paypal for some reason didn’t protect me. Fuckers.
First year I was getting back into it I wanted to make a trade with one of the (I thought) respected big sellers. The guy had thousands of followers so I thought it would be fine.
I remember I wanted a GS treecko and crystal kingdra. I traded a handful of eseries holos including Charizard blastoise and a few others. Deal was imo very fair, but I only received treecko and not kingdra. Also treecko was damaged. And the other guy just ignored me
Still salty, all I got was a damaged gold star for my gradable e-reader holos
I’m sorry to hear that. I wonder why they didn’t send the other card?
I’ve only been scammed once but eBay actually saved me. Guy bought a $700+ card from me and kept wanting a partial refund, gave him $10 in hopes he would shut up but he kept asking for more. I declined, he opens a return and sends back a piece a paper in an envelope saying you should have done a partial refund.
I contact eBay and sign an affidavit, I received all my money back and his account was removed from eBay. Only scam I had within about 10 years of buying/selling from eBay.
I still have all the screenshots from his messages and I still look back at it if I want to laugh about it.
Woah that’s actually wild. He just sent a note telling you you should have done a partial refund?
Funny thing was I’m in NYC for school, so my mom had to pick up the package at the post office and opened it there in front of the head postal worker and she sent me the photo of it.
I wasn’t surprised by it since he edited my listing photo to show that there was “damage” when he received it.
Here are the screenshots if you want a laugh.
Yes, I have and I apologize for how long this is since it’s not related to Pokemon but I still think it’s worth telling. I was 19 (ten years ago), it was my first year away at college and I received an email to my university account from this “professor” who was looking for an assistant to help him with buying supplies and stuff. Said I could make $400 a week and I can make my own schedule. There was maybe an entire second where I thought that this wasn’t legit and that I’m being scammed. However, I looked at all of the items sitting on my Amazon wish list and they were practically begging me to buy them so I went ahead with accepting the position. I figured because it was sent to my university email that not just anybody could email me and they had to be related to the university in some way. Spoiler alert they weren’t.
I’m fuzzy on the details since it all happened so fast and it was so long ago. Basically the person told me that I need to send money to some colleagues oversees so they can buy items for their class and students. He claimed that he didn’t have time to do it which is why he needed me. If I recall correctly, he had sent me a fake check that I was able to cash through an ATM (because it couldn’t tell if it was fraudulent or not) and it added $2400 to my account (I figured that if it was fake it wouldn’t have added money to my account). He said I needed to take $2000 and wire it somewhere in southern Africa, then I could keep the $400 for my wages. Sounded simple enough. Then to my surprise, I look at my bank account a couple days later and my balance is about -$300. The check that I cashed through the ATM bounced and the money I wired was taken out. I had less than $2000 in my account before cashing that check and I had lost it all, plus some. I was about to sell everything I had (TV, game consoles, games, etc) to make up what I lost but luckily I was able to take out a student loan to get myself out of the negatives since I didn’t have a job at the time.
I was extremely mad and disappointed at myself because I recognized the red flags along the way but I ignored them in favor of greed. However, I definitely learned my lesson after that. If something sounds to good to be true, it probably is.
As much as I look back at that experience with embarrassment and regret I felt like I learned from it. I ended up going into IT while in school and got a job at the University help desk for a few years. There I learned how frequently these types of scams and phishing attempts were sent to students and how often they worked. I even helped out a lot of students by informing them how to identify these kinds of threats and how to avoid them. So in some way my scamming story came full circle.
That was a wild ride. You had a lot of patience with the buyer. You handled it really well