Many people log into ebay's auctions systems looking for the perfect deal on an Apple Product. This huge demand creates a enormous interest by the average Joe and organized crime to somehow profit of the unsuspecting ebay users lack of knowledge. Here the most common SELLER scams first.

You find an auction with a very very reasonable even almost unrealistic price. The sellers account can be Powerseller, perfect feedback, paypal accepted.... too good to be true ! When you reading the ad the most obvious thing about the item for sale is the seller mentioning that you should contact him by emailing him outside of ebay. RED FLAG !! Almost all of those auctions are Hijacked EBAY accounts where someone has managed to get access to the Sellers ebay account and not their PayPal account and thus are trying to get you to complete this sale outside of ebay at a bargainous price. Email address used are always not traceable once like @hotmail , @ yahoo or @gmail.

My criteria for avoiding being scammed on ebay.

1. Auction starting with contact me right now with a buy it now of only 1/2 of list price, at an email address mention in the ad.
2. Check previous or other auctions if Seller normally sells hunderds of let's say Stamps and suddenly sells Top of the line computer equipment
3. Any question you want to ask do it only thru clicking ebay's ASK the Seller a question
   
4. Should the item be local, see if pick up is possible. This could still mean you are getting scammed but chances are Scammers do not like their picture take with a camera phone for example hence should it be a fraudulent auction you can at least see the person and the merchandise
5. ONLY pay with PAYPAL, otherwise you lose all posibility of recourse, NEVER send CASH OR Money Orders, if you send a Personal Check you can do a stop payment should you realized you have been scammed but it could be too late for that.
6. If the item location does not match the ebay site the ad is run on. Many ebayers accounts that are taken over are non US-based and thus seeing a Powerbook for sale on US-ebay when Ebays account owner is registered in Spain should raise some red flags
7. Other giveaways, while normal people have to actually pay for their listing fees. Scammers don't pay them, hence their adds are always top of the line, Gallery, Bonus Pack, ever feature imagine able to stand out and sell the item as fast as possible. Normal sellers worry about those costs and rarely use all those features in the same listing.
8. Besides the listing features of the item, other things like FREE Shipping should be looked at very suspiciously. Yes some sellers give free shipping on a item to try to get people more interested, but in general I have found that the Scammers love this feature and promote it where ever they can. While Free Shipping might make sense to most people as being attractive as a selling point, most sellers I think don't use it as they pad their shipping fee just a bit to offset the fees associated with shipping, handling, final value fee, paypal fee and so on. So really free shipping is a rare thing on Apple Products unless a certain Powerseller uses this as their sales pitch and has a track record doing so.
9. Incorrect ads.... yes the Scammers aren't so smart after all, they wrote their fake Powerbook ad years ago and don't like rewriting it. While trying to sell a top of the line new MacBook Pro for example they show a picture of a Aluminum Powerbook G4 for example not knowing it can easily be identified for the missing isight in the screen bezel. Or sometimes they even show a 3 year old Titanium Powerbook G4 and try to sell it with the specs of a MacBook Pro.
10. Auctions are most of the time 1 day auctions to avoid attracting too much attention and ending before the ebayers who's account was hijacked notices this has happened and takes counter measures by reporting their account to have been compromised.
    
11. If it is too good to be true it usually is NOT !!.... and one of the rules above applies.

Having bought hunderds of Powerbooks on Ebay myself I have never gotten scammed yet. Basic common sense and investigating techniques are the key for avoiding the average scam auctions. Should you find an auction and believe to have found a deal, ask yourself why someone else hasn't snatched this item up at this unbelievable price.

The ultimate scams are those that combine hacked ebay account and hacked paypal account, some still throw flags like those I mentioned before but your gut feeling is most of the time correct with these listings. This leads me to my final and may be even most important remark, regardless how the scam artists manage to get your ebay's account information always have a seperate and very different password for ebay / paypal !!!!

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