When it comes to buying Apple products, you should make sure a deal isn’t too good to be true when you sign up for it.
A U.K. man who purchased a MacBook on eBay for a bargain price was surprised by what arrived in the mail — not a laptop but a black-and-white photograph of a MacBook.
The MacBook was spied on eBay for around £300 (approximately $343). That’s a pretty great bargain on any recent Apple laptop, but as usual when an Apple deal appears too good to be true, something was afoul.
“The package was as light as a feather. Why bother sending a picture in a box? It doesn’t make any sense. I almost had to laugh,” buyer Paul Barrington told The Telegraph. Barrington sold his surfboard to afford the MacBook in order to start a new wedding DJ business.
In all likelihood, Barrington fell for a common scam, in which would-be buyers of a discount Apple product miss the fine print on an eBay listing that says a would-be buyer is making a purchase of a photo of an item, instead of that item itself.
According to an eBay rep, Barrington will be getting a refund “as soon as possible” and the matter will be investigated. We’ll see how that works out for him.
Source: Telegraph
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
20 responses to “Here’s one good reason not to buy a MacBook on eBay”
Bought a MacBook on eBay years ago for a really good deal, recieved a toaster oven. True story, got a refund from PayPal pretty quick.
eBay/PayPal are usually pretty good at refunding scams. On the other hand, it’s usually pretty easy to spot scam artists. That’s why he got such a good price for it – nobody else was bidding because everybody else knew something smelled fishy.
Buyer protect is a life/wallet saver!
René Margritte salutes.
Ceci n’est pas un Macbook Pro.
Good God.
Ebay always refunds these scams even if it’s in the “fine print” and usually kicks the seller off eBay. Maybe Paypal too. The buyer will get their money back immediately. If the seller already took the money out they are on the hook. If it were a hijacked acct they’d have sent nothing. This is just a swindler. eBay will thump them hard.
Don’t get me started on such scams on Alibaba.
They take your money and never send anything.
Happens all the Time, ebay and Amazon and all the other sites, scammers will always try old tricks and new tricks paypal coughs up your always protected my advice if you want to Buy expensive Goods Buy it from a shop with a proper Guarantee and paper work, it can be risky online
never a good idea to buy anything on eBay. too many fakes and bozos out there. At least Amazon has decent refund/return policy and customer services.
That happened to me before when I was buying an iPad, except my scammer
had the decency to print it on stationary! His new MacBook probably has a
pretty similar battery life though to an actual one haha. My battery
life just shot up by 2 hours after using detoxmymac(dot)org thank God… I hope he gets this figured out.
This story goes both ways.
I sold a blu-ray movie on eBay and the buyer asked for a full refund because the package arrived damaged by the shipment company.
I apologized, offered him to return the item to me and offered him the full refund for the item but not for the shipping. He opened a case against me and eBay, without giving my any chance to defend myself, fully refunded him. And he kept the blu-ray.
Oh and also by damage, I mean the corner of the blu-ray hard case was dent.
Up until that time I sold my laptop, my console, my cameras. After that incident I stopped.
Knowing eBay and their crappy policies I’m sure they’l side with the seller….UGH…But, yes. I won’t buy ANYTHING I can’t touch and inspect in person anymore. Too many scams and locked out devices out there being sold. Another tip….ALWAYS so a simple reboot of anything you’re buying…a running device won’t necessarily show it’s got a passcode lock (especially an AppleID assigned at startup to login) so I always reboot the device to make sure there’s no passcodes in place and if there are and seller can’t disable it I’m out.
Couldn’t be bothered with reading past the headline, I take it?
What crappy policies? Can’t understand the hate for eBay. It’s like any mall or marketplace, some stuff is a bargain, some is overpriced, some is good quality, some is crap, some sellers are good, some not so much. Each seller’s record is there so you can check them out before you bid. That’s more information than you get on Kijiji or Craigslist. The terms are spelled out, as are the shipping costs. I’ve bought somewhere between 150 and 200 items (including 3 guitars and an iMac) in the last 10 years and have had 3problems, all of which were refunded promptly.
£300 currently converts to $441. You’ve converted Euros to dollars in your article, not GBP, which Apple also seems to like doing meaning the UK has crazy expensive apple gear! So a £300 macbook would have seemed too good to be true! Turns out it was.
eBay Sucks
eBay Sucks, Don’t buy or sell on eBay
Recently bought a 2010 MacBook Pro on eBay for AU$400. Only issue with it was a cracked trackpad. Happy to say, I’m typing this response on it now. It was a great bargin but at the time, I was worried something like this was going to happen to me as well.
What a shame… even worse is that he used charity as a poor excuse to justify what he did.