eBay, like other big sites, is fighting fraud every day, but fraudsters have new tactics to bypass the security of ebay. Let me present to you some of the methods used to steal your money. Methods are divided in two categories:

A. Seller Scam
1. Classic scam on eBay(1). Fraudsters make ebay users with stolen credit cards and post fake auction. 90% of this auction don’t get live to ebay. After that fraudsters will reply to you with some common texts like these.
2. Classic scam on eBay(2). After spamming for ebay users, fraudsters will post fake auctions and we are back at point 1. The only difference is that now the seller has feedback, and in many cases this feedback is quite high and positive.
3. eBay second chance scam. In generally, scammers which do ebay fraud are very good organized and have good knowledge of how ebay system works. They will try to find a bug in the system and use it to get the user’s email address just from his username. This program is called ebay extractor and on the black market has a price between 5k-20k us dollars. With this program they can sending fake second chance offers through just one click to thousands of completed auctions.
4. Seller will not send the item. After the payment is made the seller could not ship the item or ship another item different from the one listed.

B. Buyer Scam
1. Fake check order. After you have listed your object on ebay you’ll be contacted to sell it with a higher price that you have requested and the buyer will try to send you a fake check. After the item is shipped and the check cashed you’ll think that you have made a good deal, but the check will bounce in 2-3 weeks. More on check fraud here
2. Fake paypal. Buyer wants to pay through paypal. You’ll think that you are secured, but the payment will be made from a hacked or stolen paypal account and after 3-4 days 100% will be a charge back.
3. Non-material items like domains, e-books, etc isn’t protected by paypal and there always is a chance that the buyer could make a charge back.
4. Steal from the package. If you sell a laptop or something like that, the buyer could steal the memory or the hard drive and ship the laptop back because it was broken or another reason and you are scammed.

This methods are some of the most used on ebay. It can varies from a transaction to another, but the best way to be protected is to research. Another tip: eBay doesn’t offer any protection program through MoneyGram, WesternUnion or anything like that. You can read more about the fake eBay protection service here