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How Not to Sell Bitcoin on eBay for 300% Profit

whatilearnedtoday.jameslarisch.com

51–60 of 104 posts

Re: How Not to Sell Bitcoin on eBay for 300% Profit

#51

>I have never traded stocks. I have never taken an economics course. I have never aspired to be someone who trades money for money. This is how someone becomes greedy. >As an advocate of privacy, Bitcoin intrigued me at a fundamental level. Trying to make money was (hopefully) merely a side effect. Just a side effect! >I would be scraping maybe $5-10 every BTC, and I would have to wait weeks to see the money. I also…

Don't dare compare him with Wall Street, he wasn't cheating on anyone. He was just making the Bitcoins flow more freely, and reach places they couldn't have reached otherwise. He was the free market at work.

Re: How Not to Sell Bitcoin on eBay for 300% Profit

#52
post #10

Selling virtual items on ebay is a bad idea. But you can also block non-US buyers I believe which will slightly reduce your risk.

Actually the US buyers are the risk, since in US and Australia anyone can issue a chargeback. In most countries you can't unless you have a premium card I think. I read in in Wikipedia some time ago.

Re: How Not to Sell Bitcoin on eBay for 300% Profit

#53

By placing a ban on virtual currency transactions in their own fine print, but allowing most of the transactions to go through unless and until there is a problem, PayPal is setting themselves up for issues. In this case, only the author of the article was victimized, but it would be almost as easy to victimize PayPal/eBay itself even if the supply of legitimate Bitcoin sellers on eBay dried up. One person could easi…

No. That's not true. I once initiated a chargeback (and won the case) against a scammer seller. The amount was $80, but I inly got the $45 left in his account.

Re: How Not to Sell Bitcoin on eBay for 300% Profit

#54

My favorite part is his earnest naivety in somehow thinking he wasn't the mark and in believing that Paypal would ever side on his behalf. This just further confirms my suspicions that you have to be retarded to get involved with bitcoin. No group of people is so easily and quickly persuaded into losing their money, and so readily eager to repeat said behavior over and over again, than bitcoiners.

How exactly am I gonna lose my money with Bitcoin? It has been there for many years, and it has grown x20. My dollars, on the other hand, have only devalued each year.

There's no scam, if there's no scammer. Think about it.

Re: How Not to Sell Bitcoin on eBay for 300% Profit

#55

I am surprised that in his research, the author didn't come across any warnings not to sell Bitcoin on Ebay. This is pretty common knowledge these days. I was also under the impression that PayPal does not allow selling Bitcoin or Bitcoin hardware. This transaction should have been stopped automatically, and it's a shame Ebay doesn't have automatic tools to stop blatant abuse of their own policies.

Yeah I'm about to test that latter rule. Dispute against me seeing bitcoin hardware that was "never received".

Re: How Not to Sell Bitcoin on eBay for 300% Profit

#56
It's pretty sad, considering that if the buyer sent the bitcoin address to send to through paypal you can prove to paypal cryptographically beyond any and all doubt that you really sent the coins.

Even when someone isn't claiming their account was hacked (which would be a problem no amount of cryptographic proof would solve) paypal simply doesn't care. I guess that really sums up paypal: Paypal doesn't care.

Re: How Not to Sell Bitcoin on eBay for 300% Profit

#57
post #7

This is the most classic bitcoin scam - buy with paypal, then claim you didn't receive the item. The seller has no way of proving that you did, and Paypal will rule on the buyer's side every single time. This is why trading channels like #bitcoinotc discourage any use of paypal - but for times where you have to use it, there's the trust system.

More info on the #bitcoin-otc advice on paypal: http://wiki.bitcoin-otc.com/wiki/Using_bitcoin-otc#Notes_on_...

Re: How Not to Sell Bitcoin on eBay for 300% Profit

#59
post #35
post #7

This is the most classic bitcoin scam - buy with paypal, then claim you didn't receive the item. The seller has no way of proving that you did, and Paypal will rule on the buyer's side every single time. This is why trading channels like #bitcoinotc discourage any use of paypal - but for times where you have to use it, there's the trust system.

Gee, if it's really so foolproof then all of these comments (and OP's lamentation) seem to be missing the point. Clearly there is a free lunch, and it's buying Bitcoin on Ebay. http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=bitcoin Look at all that free money. I mean, for the small price of feeling like a twat, a small transaction fee, and locking up a couple hundred bucks for a month... you get a Bitcoin. So why aren't these l…

I don't think it's just the "twat" factor. You can only do so many "I haven't received the goods, refund my money" before you accumulate such a horrendous feedback that nobody will do business with you again. In addition there is a chance your paypal/ebay accounts can get shut down.

Re: How Not to Sell Bitcoin on eBay for 300% Profit

#60
post #52
post #10

Selling virtual items on ebay is a bad idea. But you can also block non-US buyers I believe which will slightly reduce your risk.

Actually the US buyers are the risk, since in US and Australia anyone can issue a chargeback. In most countries you can't unless you have a premium card I think. I read in in Wikipedia some time ago.

I don't think that these sort of scams are generally run using the buyer's personal credit card, and if so this feature of foreign credit cards by no means provides protection against getting scammed by international buyers. Stolen US credit card numbers are a global commodity, so it is very possible for you to be ripped off by, for instance, a Malaysian buyer using a US credit card number.
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