# Ebay Account Suspended



## fp1erle0n1 (Mar 3, 2013)

Hi all,
This is my first post. 
I Have been buying scrap gold on eBay for almost a year. 
It is a frustrating experience. Given my experience at least 25% of the sellers are selling scrap lots that are not as described in the description. When item are recieved they are not as expected and payed. Lower weights. Lower karats. Some times completely fake or just gold plated. So I have to contact those sellers and ask for partial refund or full ones shipping back the items paying attention to add delivery confirmation and signature confirmation for items over 250$. 
Well this created a problem for eBay on the long run. They contacted me to tell me that they would suspend my account for the too many request of refunds/ship backs and eBay buyer protection cases opened. It sounded so stupid to me. Why should I be the one paying for the mistakes of some (around 20-25%) sellers that are selling copper items as gold? Well I tried to talked with those bunch of morons from eBay but it really looks like they don't get my point. It is like if the police would tell you to do not call them more than twice a month! But what if your house is robbed 3 times in the same month? Instead of helping you they would arrest you because u called 1 extra time? So stupid! And I have been good w eBay buying 50000$ of scrap gold in the last 4 months. They definitely made more money out of that than me. 
My question to you guys is:
1) what are the alternatives for buying scrap gold in a safe way without risking to loose all the money?
2) any other Internet platform where to bid
3) some of the users of this blog willing to trade gold?

Please let me know. 
Thanks
Filippo


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## goldsilverpro (Mar 3, 2013)

I've never bought any scrap on eBay or any other internet auction and, most likely, never will. Before buying anything I must hold it (heft it) in my hand, weigh it, examine it closely, and be able to test it. No exceptions. I would suggest you learn to do the same.


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## rusty (Mar 3, 2013)

fp1erle0n1 said:


> Hi all,
> This is my first post.
> I Have been buying scrap gold on eBay for almost a year.
> It is a frustrating experience. Given my experience at least 25% of the sellers are selling scrap lots that are not as described in the description. When item are recieved they are not as expected and payed. Lower weights. Lower karats. Some times completely fake or just gold plated. So I have to contact those sellers and ask for partial refund or full ones shipping back the items paying attention to add delivery confirmation and signature confirmation for items over 250$.
> ...



I'm glad that ebay is taking action against those buyers who submit not as described claims in great numbers, in the sellers preferences they should also include buyers who have made more than one claim for the past 6 months to be added as none eligible bidders or buyers. Goes to say I would black list - all.

The two most recent not as described cases filed against me the buyers returned the packages C.O.D. in addition had to pay Customs Duty on one.

It''s too easy for the buyer to do a full or partial substitute on goods being returned, without an ombudsman selling goods on ebay is a crap shoot.

This new budget is only going to make things worse, from here on in I'll demand payment up front via postal money orders or certified check before I ship.

The competition for high quality gold is fierce, gold sold by forum members will sell a few points below spot


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## fp1erle0n1 (Mar 3, 2013)

rusty said:


> fp1erle0n1 said:
> 
> 
> > Hi all,
> ...



Well! When the 25% of the eBay sellers are selling 10grams of 14k gold and when you get it they are 9.0grams and 2 grams are just not gold and 3 grams are 10karats instead I 14karats... Then it becomes necessary to open a case or ask a refund. Maybe would help if eBay sellers would be honest sellers..


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## its-all-a-lie (Mar 3, 2013)

fp1erle0n1 said:


> rusty said:
> 
> 
> > fp1erle0n1 said:
> ...



There is too much dishonesty in ebays community, both on the sellers and the buyers, and with the ebay/paypal regime. I have heard stories of buyers opening cases, having ebay side with them, they tell buyer to send the item back and as soon as the package is marked as delivered paypal refunds the money and the seller is left with an empty box. There is no way to keep from being scammed when dealing on the internet and i agree there should be an option to block buyers who have opened multiple cases in the past, on the other hand, there should also be an option to block sellers who have had cases opened against them as well. So long as man lives there will be greed, and with greed comes crooks who intend to rob you blind.


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## rusty (Mar 3, 2013)

What type of scale are you using, when was the last time it was calibrated and how are you testing your karat gold to determine its karat. 

Did you know that the manufacture is allowed to be off a small percentage of the hallmark.


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## rusty (Mar 3, 2013)

fp1erle0n1 suggested reading, the forums Best of Ebay thread. http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=7109


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## element47.5 (Mar 3, 2013)

In a normal economy, ebay was and has been a reasonably reliable means of transacting goods. In the economy we have now, no way. The opportunities for fraud are just rampant, Paypal and ebay together extract a nearly 14% fee load from sellers, and the PayPal dispute resolution scheme is utterly brutal to sellers. One thing about business (of any sort, not just on ebay) is that whether deliberate or accidental/unitentional, somebody screwing up on you results in pretty much the same thing. The buyer in any and all cases must pay shipping both ways for any disputed sale, and the seller must accept an unopened box for PP to release funds held against a dispute. I have sold (and bought) quite a few things (expensive things, like $6000 guitars) on ebay and yeah, had a problem here and there but was generally able to avoid by asking very, very, very critical questions of sellers or, in the case of a buyer of expensive things, providing extensive descriptions or somehow getting into some kind of dialog to find out just how much of an honest person (vs dirtbag) the buyer might be. In present cirumstances, though,* it really, really pays for dishonest sellers to deliberately misrepresent goods and then claim innocence when the rubber hits the road*. Each person deciding (or not) to transact on the venue MUST take into consideration the hazards of doing so...which are completely glossed over by ebay. 

Today, now, 2013, I do not see ebay as being a viable venue for buying things that can be faked or overdescribed so "innocently" as scrap gold jewelry. I could see buying sterling flatware, and even a lot of it, and I have (hundreds of kilos of it) because I can see STERLING stamped on the backs of the forks. 

But in very few cases does ebay hold any interest for me any more. They have quite simply gone to crap, and any kind of complaint is ignored or "well, you just belong to the 1.3% who don't fall into our 98.7% satisfaction rate". I am done with them. I only use them as a price reference and no longer keep any funds in my PP account, mostly to make it difficult for me to accidentally buy something. They suck.


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## fp1erle0n1 (Mar 3, 2013)

rusty said:


> What type of scale are you using, when was the last time it was calibrated and how are you testing your karat gold to determine its karat.
> 
> Did you know that the manufacture is allowed to be off a small percentage of the hallmark.




Scale is double digit scale from Zeis and I check calibration every week with 50grams reference weight. 
Trust me the scale is calibrated. When the weight is off is off more than 5% than the nominal weight. Only in that case I would complain. For testing equipment I use electronic tester Auracle for first screening and when a piece really doesn't convince me I send it for XRF gun scan. I trust my assaying methods cause was always consistent with the results from the refiner that I use and that is amazing. I found it here on this blog.
Yes I am well aware about the fact that a 14k piece is almost never 14.0000kartas but that could be as low 13.5k. I consider this in my bidding strategy that follows the spot price of gold, moving averages, return from refinery a percentage of bad sellers. 
When item are off respect to their description they are very off. 14k testing as 10k. 18k that is gold plated. And so on. 
I don't agree that buyers on eBay they are always protected. My case shows exactly that they are not! Start bidding on eBay gold scrap items and you will see that out of 10 items you will order 2-3 will be out of their description. Is a fact. Many sellers know that they are selling out of desription and when u ask for refunds they immediately accept. Personally I wouldnt give any refunds if I was sure the items I'm selling are exactly as stated. 
F.


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## NobleMetalWorks (Mar 3, 2013)

ebay is in the business of making money. If you are returning items, ebay isn't making money. So most likely, if anyone has to be "let go" it's going to be the buyer that is creating problems for ebay making a profit. It has less to do with what's right or wrong and more to do with how much ebay makes. If you think of it in these terms, any company or corporation that has public stock holders are only responsible to them, they are not morally responsible to do the right thing. So regardless of what might be right or wrong, they are only choosing between how to make more money or less.

If you sell your gold, whoever you are selling your gold to is going to figure the percentage, not karat, at the lowest possible percentage. There is actually a range that you can be in when figuring percentages to k (karat). 

When people weigh their karat jewelry, sometimes it's weight by regular ounces as opposed to troy ounces. If you are not sure how the seller is selling their karat jewelry there are two things you can do, simply ask if the weight measurement is in oz or ozt. Or even better, and this is what I personally do, I never buy anything in oz/ozt I purchase by grams, in that way there is no confusing, period.

If you are dealing with a buyer on ebay, and worried or concerned about their legitimacy, get everything in writing before you bid. If you have a question ask, if you want pictures of the hallmarks, ask. By doing your groundwork before you bid, you will bid with more confidence and have a paper trail (so to speak since it's really email) of all the questions and answers, and if there is a real discrepancy, you can show your email trail and prove your point. If you are ever not sure, get it in writing.

Most buyer returns are not because the seller is at fault, but because the buyer has misread or assumed something that was not the case. People who auction things, and have sold many items, know this fact well and will often times purposefully word things to mislead a buyer, but are protected because they didn't actually lie. A good example of this are the people selling "gold pin drops".



> Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
> 
> Albert Einstein



If you have purchased enough items, and complained about 25% of your transactions, that ebay has decided you are a problem buyer that would lead me to believe that you continued repeating the same mistakes, over and over and over expecting different results. Why in the world would you wouldn't you just simply purchase from the 75% of the people you have found who you evidently are satisfied with?

Also, did you contact the sellers first before making the claim through ebay? Most times, if you just simply speak with the person you purchased from, you can resolve your differences by just talking it through. This ultimately is the best way to conduct business, directly, and not through a 3rd party you are trusting to police the decision in a way that is fair and right. Too often people are not happy and right away request through ebay that the transaction be questioned. 

It sounds like you are purchasing large quantities of karat jewelry, if this is the case why are you purchasing through ebay, and not talking with jewelers, pawn shops, gold buyers about purchasing their material. There is a gold buyer not far from where I live who I purchase 10k material from on a fairly regular basis. I pay him 1% over what he would get if he sold to his regular gold buyer, which still leaves me a respectable profit margin, and I retain more silver in the process. There are many other ways to purchase karat jewelry that will keep you safer, legally as well. I would be careful about purchasing karat jewelry from anyone online who doesn't have a brokers license. Most states require gold buyers to take pictures and submit paperwork to their local law enforcement agencies, and then retain the items for 30 days. If not they are subject to specific laws and fines. If your state has such laws, you might be not only violating them, but you might be violating Federal laws governing illegal transactions between states when you cross state lines.

In any case, I don't really understand how you think you have the right to complain, it seems that you repeated your same mistakes and continued doing so expecting different results, and got burned in the process more than once.

I have never had a return on ebay, but if someone requested me to allow them to return an item, I would do so, and immediately. To me it's worth the good will, and I know I can always sell the item to someone else. I have requested a refund from someone on ebay, for flask bungs, because they were smaller than advertised. I ended up keeping the stoppers and taking cost of the stoppers off of other items I ended up purchasing from the same seller. Sometimes just simply communicating with the seller helps turn a bad situation into a good situation.

When I owned a retail store (brick and mortar) I had a policy of returning anything a customer brought back. However, a few times I came across people who consistently returned items, they would purchase, go home, a few days later return, consistently. In those cases I am not making any profit off that person. Contrary, I am loosing money because of the time, effort, energy, labor, paperwork, etc involved in returning whatever items they were returning. I had to ask those people to not come back, or I would have to change my return policy. It sounds like that is exactly what ebay did with you.

I hope you take this in the spirit it is intended, and not take offense. I think that maybe, if you understand things through the eyes of someone else, you might think of your situation differently.

Business is business and Christmas is Christmas!

Scott


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## fp1erle0n1 (Mar 3, 2013)

NobleMetalWorks said:


> ebay is in the business of making money. If you are returning items, ebay isn't making money. So most likely, if anyone has to be "let go" it's going to be the buyer that is creating problems for ebay making a profit. It has less to do with what's right or wrong and more to do with how much ebay makes. If you think of it in these terms, any company or corporation that has public stock holders are only responsible to them, they are not morally responsible to do the right thing. So regardless of what might be right or wrong, they are only choosing between how to make more money or less.
> 
> If you sell your gold, whoever you are selling your gold to is going to figure the percentage, not karat, at the lowest possible percentage. There is actually a range that you can be in when figuring percentages to k (karat).
> 
> ...



Yes I purchased over 50k$ of lo scrap on eBay in the last 4 months. 
First is not true that eBay didn't make money out of me cause the 9% of 50k$ is 4.5k$. I probably made half of that. 
As said at the beginning 25% is the amount (more or less) of transactions that didn't end as it started. The majority of the times if something was not right on the gold lot I contacted the seller and he was the one proposing partial refunds. Probably he knew that he was selling over the description. In 15 cases out of more than 300 items purchased I had to open a case. eBay complained about those partial refunds that trust me were due and deserved. 
I'm not here complaining.
I'm here to ask better places where to find scrap gold.


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## patnor1011 (Mar 3, 2013)

fp1erle0n1 said:


> I'm here to ask better places where to find scrap gold.



Who knows where do you live... 
There is no answer to your question. You have to find it yourself. Scott gave you few hints already. I doubt anybody is going to give you address. Try ask in buy and sell section of forum, some members are selling gold from time to time, but members here are not usual ebay crowd. People here tend to know value of gold.


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