eBay Scam - No one interested

[Meg888]

I bidded & "won" a Nin Wii on eBay; I sent payment direct to a UK bank account (foolish, I know, now in hindsight). After a few days, I tried to contact seller, with no joy. I finally get an email telling me the sellers' account was hijacked, these goods were listed in a 1 day sale & there are now 20+ other people involved who are out of pocket to the tune of �250+ each. We corresponded with each other, got the culprits name/bank dets/address (not a PO box) & even an email address - took it to police & eBay and both are saying there is nothing they can do. Apparantly, this is a small part of a very big scam - so why wont anyone follow it up? TIA

[ojread2]

It's an old scam that happens every year/all year round on Ebay.
You will even find accounts with 100% FB that haven't been hijacked selling high value electrical goods at this time of year - except all their feedback has come from buying 1p ebooks to get their FB up. Then comes the scam
If your seller has scammed enough people one of those people may have set up a group for it and you can then all get together and go to the police about it.
Never ever pay for high cost good via bank transfer
Even if you had paid by Paypal, you would probably have only been covered for �150.
Go and read the community pages on Ebay to find out exactly how old this scam, and others like it, really is

[nvqwomen]

to list a wii on ebay you must have a paypal account other wise you would not beable to list the wii . ,so if you won the wii how come you never paid by paypal, im not being funny, but i dont understand how he got away with it, i myself sold a wii on ebay, but the only way i was able to list the wii was to sell and be paid by paypal only, i couldnt even tick the box saying cheque was exceptable as ebay wouldnt allow it to submit.these sort of people make ebay a bad name, but i wish you luck

[ojread2]

Because, after the auction finished and the OP went to pay by PP, seller's PP account won't accept his payment. Seller then emails buyer to say there are problems with PP can you pay by bank transfer, postal order or any other unsafe uncovered method of payment and et voila! One scam because buyers are that desperate for Wii's etc at xmas time

[Buenchico]

You ask 'Why won't anyone follow it up?'. The simple answer is that you don't seem to have asked the right people. There are plenty of crimes which the police don't routinely handle themselves. They'll only get involved if they're brought in by another agency. (e.g. the police don't normally handle tax evasion. They leave that to HMRC. Similarly, drug-smuggling rings are often investigated solely by HMRC, with the police only being brought in late on).

In your case, the people who WILL be interested in your plight are your local Trading Standards department. Over the past few years, Trading Standards departments (which used to be vastly under-funded) have been given extra resources, specifically to deal with online crime. They carry out their own investigations and then involve the police when necessary. (The police can easily refuse to help an individual eBay customer. It's far harder for them to refuse to help Trading Standards, especially when they've got evidence of a major scam).

You can find contact details for your local Trading Standards office by entering your postcode here:
http://www.tradingstandards.gov.uk/

Chris