eBay auctions won by non-paying first-time bidders

[pianowizard]

In recent weeks, I have seen many laptop auctions on eBay that were won for ridiculously high prices by bidders with zero feedback, for example http://cgi.ebay.com/Dell-Latitude-LS-P3 ... dZViewItem . Has anyone else noticed that? They are obviously just pranksters who like to waste others' time and money. Has anyone here been affected by those [censored]?

[AlphaKilo470]

Looks like they are trying to create an artificial price/demand shift. That's more than ten times what I paid for my T21 last month. There's another guy on eBay who's trying to sell an A21p with no hard drive, battery, ac adaptor or hard drive caddy for $200.

[pianowizard]

That's more than ten times what I paid for my T21 last month.

Wow, you paid less than $120 for your T21? Did that include AC adaptor, hard drive, and memory? I just won a T21 on eBay for $160 including shipping yesterday and thought that was unusually cheap!

[AlphaKilo470]

Mine was missing hard drive, battery and ac adaptor. However, it did come with the 3Com 56k/100mbps Ethernet MiniPCI combo and 128mb RAM and a CD drive. I added a battery I paid $20 for, a 40gb hard drive I paid $25 for, some RAM I got for free and a DVD drive I got along with a cd drive for $15. I'm also using an AC adaptor I got for free so all in all I really paid $160 total but still I consider the deal to be pretty decent given that's $40 less than I sold my old 400mhz 600E w/ tons of accessories for. However, the number isn't toally steady as the hard drive has been used in five different computers since I got it and has pretty much paid for itself long before the T21 got here.

[bigtiger]

This has been going on for a very long time. There are some users from out side of USA. They are able to create some fake accounts and bid rediculous prices. Then they will send you a fake PayPal account. That happened to me many times.

eBay is doing nothing now. I have to push them very hard to refund me the listing fees in time. They insist that I should wait at least a week and send a dispute request to both parties, bla, bla. That way, they can use my money--fees based on the rediculous high price, for free.

Members be aware.