Seriously considering a great deal on an “open box” laptop from a seller in Hong Kong. It’s half the price of an identical brand new laptop. The description “open box” says that it could be a “factory second”:
The seller doesn’t accept returns, but the item is still covered under ebay’s “eBay Money Back Guarantee - Get the item you ordered or your money back”, which I understand still applies for items that can’t be returned.
Thoughts? Cautions?
Probably a scam. It’s a new thing, posting things that are actually “too good to be true” but located in China or similar, and then the money is sent, the buyer disappears, and nothing happens.
There are similar reports in the hundreds *(maybe in the thousands), but luckily eBay is making good on most of them. There was a FB group for such, but I think it went away.
Anyway: look for “is this a new seller”? Red flag. “Do they have fewer than 10 sales?” Red flag. What is the method of delivery? (If not specified, red flag.) etc.
Thanks. The seller joined in Dec 2025, has only 3 items for sale (two laptops and a $17 bracelet) and has sold nothing so far. No reviews either. Shipping is via eBay SpeedPAK Standard so at least that seems legit.
…and now one of the laptops is no longer for sale. Have a look:
I sent a question to the seller a few hours ago. No response yet.
I got beat on one of those, i forget for what. $80 item was for $20, never came, seller disappeared. Ebay made me whole, but with hassle.
There’s an Anker group on FB (solar storage batteries) where it’s happened multiple times, always the same pattern. New seller, few reviews, terrific price. Sometimes ebay reimburses sometimes not (or the guy just didn’t report to the rest of us).
Buying from china use Temu or Ali, not from individuals, I think.
[ Just closing the loop on this… ]
So, despite Goofy’s warnings and prior experience, I decided to take the risk and order an “open box” 15” Macbook Air M4 from this seller. I figured I’d get my money back from Ebay eventually no matter what in the event of an unscrupulous seller.
Well, I placed the order on 1/1, and two days later, I got notice from ebay that it was being shipped. A day after that, I got USPS tracking info! So, I thought, great, perhaps I will get this thing after all. Well the item “arrived” 3 days after that, and USPS informed me that it was delivered to me - at or near my mailbox - at 1:12 PM. The only problem is I was home at the time, and heard no USPS truck and there was no package to be found, either at my house, or with the neighbors on either side of me.
So, I ended up opening a service ticket with USPS using the tracking number, and they replied 1 day later with a photo of the package that was delivered. Lo and behold, the sender was “meh.com in Texas, and it was delivered to a “Bob” in the town where I live, and the package weighed only 8 oz, instead of the over 3.3 lbs that a real 15” Macbook Air M4 would weigh. USPS blocked out the full address for security reasons. And note that the ebay seller info shows as being in Hong Kong.
So, the scam is being revealed. I complained to the seller and amazingly s/he replied that s/he was sorry, and not to worry: I could either ask for a reshipment or a refund. I requested the refund.
A day later, I get a msg that a second shipment was being sent. I complained to the seller immediately, and said I had wanted a refund instead, and s/he replied to be patient.
At this point I revealed that I knew the first shipment came from meh.com in Texas and was sent to “Bob” instead of me.
Two hours later ebay notified me that the seller had asked them to step in, and they said the seller couldn’t verify shipping to me, and so I was refunded the full purchase price.
So, perhaps the seller got scared of being found out to be a scammer?
Who knows. Note that Meh.com is actually a real site, and they do apparently allow people to buy very cheap stuff from other sellers. But I found no Macbooks for sale there.
Ultimately I fail to see how the seller/scammer thought he could get away with this. Do some people just never bother to attempt to get their money back? I mean, this was a $400 item, not some throw away $20 trinket.
UPDATE: the ebay seller/scammer’s account and products are gone. Perhaps ebay did its job after I revealed the scam.
I may miss out occasionally, but if a deal sounds too good to be true, I assume it is and move on. I learned that when I tried to buy my WinXP box many years ago (got really lucky as this was direct, not through a site like Ebay). I ended up getting the computer from a legit source, after barely getting my money back from the shady site.
Glad you seem to have come out of it OK. You were lucky.
Of course they do. And they don’t. And then eBay steps in and refunds the money, the scammer has the $$$ in pocket, eBay pays, and the scammers disappear.
Couple hours work for some desk jockey in North Korea (or elsewhere), and dollars received.
Vice News had a great series on North Korea a couple years ago. Not sure this is the right episode, but it looks like it might be:
Ah, of course. How naive of me. I didn’t realize it would be Ebay’s money that would be refunded to me, not my money that the scammer no doubt immediately transferred to some place Ebay couldn’t get to.
And now I also feel bad for doing this “experiment” . 
I ended up being the stupid fish who was hooked by a tempting morsel. I wonder if I was the only one. I don’t suppose contesting the charge to my Visa card (tied to PayPal which is how I paid) would do anything? I suppose Visa would know that the money was already refunded? And the scammer is almost certainly no longer within reach anyway.
But I still have a question: why would the scammer go through the charade of sending me something (from meh.com) through USPS? Why would he even bother shipping anything at all? Why not just take the money and run immediately? Just to prolong things long enough for … for what? Does Ebay not transfer any funds to the scammer’s account until the item ships?
They probably used that site to get something shipped so they could get a tracking number.
I suppose they figure if they sell something fake for $500 to 100 people, spend $3 shipping some small junk via a site like that to get a tracking number (to provide to eBay, so you can see that “it” shipped), and 99 people complain and get their money back, and one person tries but can’t follow up and then the clock runs out. They make $500 - 100*$3 = $200 basically for free. And if they run hundreds of these scams constantly, using new accounts all the time, well, it’s one way to fraudulently make money. And perhaps just before switching to a new identity (see below), they scr3w eBay by transferring all the money out and leaving eBay to pay for all the returns of the last few days or week.
Probably not. It’s just under a new account. They have “IP farms” all over Asia where there are thousands or tens of thousands of devices constantly being switched to new IP addresses, so they can register new accounts for the purposes of such fraud. It’s a whole industry. It’s kind of like the old boiler rooms in the USA, but with tech added.
Again, to get a valid tracking number to provide to eBay. That’s likely a necessary step in order to remain in business (in that incarnation of their business) … even for a few weeks.
And today’s Times has a story:
In a Southeast Asian war zone, cloaked in dense rainforest, the Chinese settlement dedicated to scamming people from Kentucky to Kazakhstan grew fast on fertile ground.Over just a few months, a sprawling office park materialized and metastasized in the chaotic borderlands of Myanmar, with cavernous rooms holding rows of computer monitors and walls decorated with inspirational work slogans: “Dream chaser,” “Keep going,” “Making money matters the most.” In video conference suites, bookshelves stocked with fake business tomes and ersatz modern art simulated the kind of boardroom a successful crypto investor might inhabit.
The scam center, Shunda Park, opened for business in 2024 with more than 3,500 workers from nearly 30 nations, including Namibia, Russia, Zimbabwe and France. Some had been kidnapped and enslaved, but all had become skilled in the art of the online grift. When the scammers bilked $5,000 out of someone, they struck a Chinese gong. A $50,000 shakedown earned a celebratory pounding of a giant drum, then an offering to a Chinese deity resplendent in his golden altar.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/world/asia/myanmar-scam-center.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
Yours is small potatoes by comparison, but a buck is a buck. There are small time grifters just as there are big time swindlers. It’s a crazy world out there.
If I were Ebay, I’d make all sellers wait at least 30 days after each successfully delivered sale before being allowed to transfer any money out of their Ebay account. This would allow the vast majority of people to get their money back without it coming out of Ebay’s bottom line.
Also, any seller that has yet to sell a single item and has no customer feedback should be prominently flagged with some bright yellow warning. A “caveat emptor” scale, if you will. And maybe even a comparison of the item selling price with other largely identical items so as to highlight “too good to be true” sales.
Yeah, it seems I’ve lived a blissfully sheltered life. Live and learn as they say.
I”m sure the suits at eBay would argue “this will make it harder for people to use the site which will lead to fewer sales which will lead to less revenue” and so on. It’s like shoplifting, it’s a cost they’re willing to bear because stationing an armed guard at every aisle will make shopping less pleasant - even as it solves the problem.
And, let’s not forget, there are now dozens of marketplaces where the scams are run: Facebook Marketplace, OfferUp, PoshMark, Etsy, DeClutter, LetGo, Craigslist, and more.
There are always going to be grifters. Some of them even grow up to be …
Is there even such a thing as an “eBay account” for money? Most of the time, I use a credit card or paypal (or some other money transfer company) to pay sellers. eBay would have to have some control over them. For over a decade, eBay owned Paypal and thus controlled payments and money flow, but they spun it off about 10 years ago (probably because pure play payments processing was valued higher at the time).
I forgot to mention earlier that there’s also a thriving market of “clean” accounts in Asia. Let’s say you are a new-ish seller on Amazon, and you want 300 4 or 5 star reviews with an average of 4.7 stars (very good for most Amazon products), you can contract with an outfit that will use a few hundred “clean” Amazon account (clean meaning have made a few purchases over time, uses a non-blacklisted address, non-blacklisted credit card, etc) and doesn’t have overly good reviews, and doesn’t have systematic “review only” activity. They use those few hundred accounts to provide this service (an average 4.7 star review on a new-ish product). They have a whole science behind it - how much time to wait after product is listed, how many purchases to wait for, etc. If the new product has too many returns, they will even process a few purchases to get the ratio down into acceptable range (based on what they thing the Amazon algorithms use to determine so). It’s amazing the ecosystem that has developed around Amazon, and even more amazing is the fraud ecosystem that has developed around it.
As a general rule, if it’s too good to be true, it indeed isn’t true. This goes double for Apple products. Apple products sell at a premium (because they are a premium brand) everywhere. They usually can’t be grey marketed, and stolen ones can very rarely be sold and used. So the variation in prices is relatively narrow. If you want a MacBook on sale, buy it on Amazon or Best Buy during their periodic sales. A recent MacBook Air was on sale for $750 on Amazon recently, and even as low as $724.99 briefly during the holiday shopping frenzy. But you aren’t going to get one for $400 unless you are willing to wait until late 2027 for a used one.
But it will only make it harder for the sellers, right? Though that could also discourage them from selling on Ebay.
Is Amazon also plagued by scammers?
Haven’t heard of any, personally, and have had good responses from sellers. Last year I left a negative review of a backup camera, I’d bought, but not used for a long time after the return date window. Seller contacted me, offered a full refund! Only caveat was I had to lighten up the review, that worked for me, they didn’t even want to product back, so it’s in a bin here somewhere, useless as far as closeup watching the trailer hitch, also disconnecting even 5’ away! So likely turn it in as electronic waste… I will have to try to find a replacement later this year…
Anyway, their overall return easy policies likely prevent scammers…
Sort of. They hold the money for a short period, and then give you the “payout”. At least, that’s my experience with them. I sold a few things last fall, and the payout was usually a few days after I shipped the item. I’m assuming (but do not know for a fact) that they were awaiting delivery confirmation. It wouldn’t kill them to delay slightly longer to be sure what was delivered was what was promised.
How exactly could they be sure?
Feedback from the buyer. I would be contacting customer support within an hour or two if I didn’t get what I expected.
But perhaps you’re away for the weekend. Or bring it in but don’t get around to it for a few hours.
But I do think there could be a “3 day payout” rule for people without a history of sales - and I suppose that someday an AI bot could flag things that are from New Sellers + Too Good To Be True.
