Hello all! Most of you know me pretty well and may have even bought lamps from me before off of ebay. Usually I'll post links to my auctions here since it IS the right place to do it, and when selling I'm much rather see my lamps go to a member here. Well I recently just had 8 auctions end on Sunday. 5 of them went without issue even got a member from here to buy one (Thanks Again Chow :) But the other 3 auctions were all bought by a ebay user by the name of joana.1912 (0) with zero feedback, new user etc. I'm almost always weary about new ebay users, usually they are a shot in the dark if they follow through with paying or not. But that doesn't mean that new users are all the same. One of my 5 successful auctions was a new user with zero feedback, but he came to pick up the globe the next day since he was local guy. And that was fine and dandy by me, his shipping address was all legit and local nothing seemed fishy and he even called me and gave me his phone number. Now when it comes to this joana.1912 character a LOT of things were out of place. For one when you sell on ebay you can the view order details where it'll show the buyers shipping and contact information. So you can prepare your package for shipment when the payment is received and cleared. Now if you look at the screen shot I took and look at this guy's address the zip code its a real zip code. And also note that if you were to google any 5 digit zip code, you'll get zip code of some random city in the US. But what really through up the red flag for me was that fact that the physical address didn't exist in the zip code he listed. Which you can easliy search for it using google maps. Also If you also look at the screen shot you can see the phone number which isn't a US area code plus it has a extension? weird I know

So as the story goes on.... this buyer sends me a message through ebay explaining that they'll be in town for the next couple weeks and would like to pick up the lamps to avoid damage in shipping. We arranged a day for pickup at a local restaurant 30 seconds from my work. Now during the correspondence the buyer did have a few weird comments and also ignore 2 of my requests for their phone number. Their comments were weird like they'll be driving a old Studebaker truck which was dark green. Who would drive a old ass truck from Cali to here? just didn't make sense. Also when it came time to set up a place to meet I mentioned the local hot dog joint called "Portillo's located here in Vernon Hills, IL" they came back to me with I can't find it listed in on google maps that they wanted the address. Now if you were to take everything I typed, inside the parenthesis, copy and paste it into google, it's the first search that pops up. So at this point I'm beginning to believe that someone is taking me for a joy ride in a shitty old truck to no where. But that's not all, their email address which is as follows abijamson@gmail.com. I looked into reverse email look up so I could see where this email came from but all those services cost money. And I've already wasted time on this guy why waste the money? After a while I started to notice that this email was a name so thanks to the savoir of googling (gotta love it) I typed in the name Abi Jamson into the search bar and low and behold look at the first 2 links on the search. (it was the first 2 links no its just one)

http://www.google.com/search?q=abi+jamson&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8...

What I found is that this guy has been constantly harassing members here as well as posting vulgar and pornographic links has now taken it a step further and has decided to target OG member's auctions. He's been banned numerous times by the mods here, and it was confirmed, using all different types of user names including one of Abi Jamson. I just don't get why some people act this way nor why they singled out my auctions either. But needless to say the clean up is going to suck and not what I wanted to deal with but I held onto my lamps and offered them to the last bidders.

Here are a few things to do to avoid bullshit like this if you ever plan to sell on ebay.

First do not list your lamps here on OG. I know it sucks and is the ideal place to post them and I've always done it but if you want to avoid situations like this its a good idea to prevent jerks like this messing up your listings. If you want to get the word out I would suggest you send private messages to all your friends and keep it private as possible.

Ebay isn't all that friendly when it comes to helping a seller with a new user who doesn't pay or is like this guy. Until you can report them and there is no way to block a new user from bidding unless they have negative feedback. You can cancel their bid(s) as the auction is still actively going but most of us know that a lot of bidding happens with the last 10 seconds of a auction. So to be that quick and delete the bad bid before it ends in next to impossible unless theres a program like snipe that will snipe out bad bids.

To try to avoid this issue from happening to you the best solution would be to make your auction for paypal users only, that way you know it's a legit account and the users has a real bank account address and contact info with paypal.

And this is obvious but NEVER ship out your lamps without them being paid for and the payment has cleared and is in your account.

I hope this helps you guys.