a (dark) tale of ebay

(excuse this TERRIBLE picture I made on paint. I am no artist, my friends)

I've written about eBay once before on here. It was a couple of years ago and when I first really got into it all. You could say I was a tiny bit obsessed. I was bidding on everything and trying to  learn pro eBay tactics to win auctions. I also sold pretty much my whole wardrobe. Anyway, this summer, I decided to start selling again. I was just feeling fed up with the bag full of old clothes under my bed. Also I've been dying to buy the contents of my online Asos basket. Yuuup.

So I took photos, wrote up the details, priced each item and after a couple of hours, I had around fifteen items listed. After a day my clothes were up to £30 and when I checked again the next morning it had risen to £60. An hour later it was at £80. I was surprised and confused and in all the excitement, I added another dress to my Asos basket. But in the back of my mind I thought it was strange how all of my listings, ranging from clothes (in a variety of sizes) to shoes to a purse, were all being so highly bid on after only a couple of days and all by one particular buyer called ange.bowd. I decided to click on this person's account and saw that they had never bought or sold anything before. To make matters more suspicious, they'd only been a member for ONE DAY. Something seemed a bit odd but I decided to ignore it. I was probably just being paranoid.

Skip five hours later and I'm sitting on the sofa with my laptop, checking to see how my eBay listings were progressing. The amount was still at £80 so I refreshed the page and suddenly the total dropped to £70. I refreshed again and it fell to £60, to £50, to £40, to £30 and then it just stopped. In the matter of seconds my total had gone from £80 to £30. I had no idea what had happened. I guessed that someone must've withdrawn their bids but I didn't know if that was even possible? I decided to check and see which items had changed in price and obviously, it was as I suspected. The same person, ange.bowd, had withdrawn their bid on every item. £50 pounds worth! When I clicked on to 'the buyer's reason', it said 'I could not contact the seller' which was rubbish. All day I'd had buyers messaging me for measurement and garment details but I'd received nothing from this person. Obviously I was angry but there wasn't much I could do about it so I decided to message this person. Instead of being angry, I decided to be delightfully passive aggressive. I thanked them for bidding on my items and apologised that they couldn't get hold of me, there must have been some strange issue with eBay today. There wasn't much more I could say but I refused to let them know I was upset.

(one of my trips to the post office...it took a while)

A couple of days later, when I was looking at ange.bowd's profile page, I saw that someone had left negative feedback saying how this buyer had bid on their items and then refused to pay. I decided to message the person who left feedback and the following day got a reply saying that this person had already been contacted by two other eBayers who had also been messed around by ange.bowd. Since we've messaged a couple of times and worked out ange.bowd has now changed their eBay name to paul.wright. Strangely, they now have positive feedback from a seller called angie and another called paul. Internet trolls tend to reuse names so my theory is that they've set up a few accounts and are using them to provide positive feedback for each other. In fact, it could be more than one person involved. Whatever this person/people are playing at, it was nice to know that it wasn't just me that'd be tricked. It was also reassuring to know that my assumption (that this person was purposely screwing people over) was actually right because for a second I wondered whether this person had tried to contact me. Anyway my next step is to report them.

The good news is that my listings all finished yesterday and, in total, I sold all fifteen items and earned £140. Even though I was messed around, my items still did well and I made more than before. So f*ck you ange.bowd. Every cloud.

Just wondering if anyone else has had a bad experience on eBay? I'd love to hear your story or even just your thoughts on mine :)