I recently took a liking to a Parker 75 in sterling silver which seemed to be reaching the end of the auction at well under the market value for this kind of item.  The old saying of buyer beware started floating around in my head and I began to wonder what other people had noticed that I had not.

A quick look at the buyer's feedback showed a recent negative with a complaint about the pen being damaged on arrival. I looked at the auction pictures, which were still available, and saw what appeared to be an undamaged pen. Now my suspicions are really aroused and I looked back into the sellers history at three neutral feedbacks which the seller had received nearly 12 month previously.

All three complains that the pens the buyer had received were not the ones pictured and were in much worse condition than those illustrated. I decided there was no way I was going to bid for something being sold by an obviously fraudulent seller. Then a though struck me about what the seller was actually doing. Perhaps the seller was using pictures from other people's auction to sell inferior examples of the same item and was trying to artificially raise the bid value by stealing pictures of mint condition pens from the auctions of more honest sellers.

I checked the sellers auctions and the evidence was right there staring me in the face. The backround of the pictures was different for each item the seller was offering and begged the question that surely anyone taking photographs of their items would always use the same set up, same place and same background, particularly if the items are all around the same size and the photographs were taken at the same time? I know I would, why change a method you know will work.

The lesson here is the obvious one of always checking the seller's feedback and then compare auctions from the same seller and see if you can spot any anomoliesbetween them, like the backgrounds, if there are a differing quality of pictures between auctions, if the pictures show various different methods of displaying the items instead of sticking with tried and trusted methods and basically looking for anything that stands out as being not quite right.

Remember; if is seems too good to be true, then it probably isn't.