bullsh*t ebay second chance offers?
keithvanhorn
3,855 Posts
this week alone, i've received 4 or 5 bogus second chance offers via private emails. they try to make it look legit by using ebay html at the bottom, however, the link is usually to the auction that you just lost, not an offical ebay second chance offer page.i don't know how this is going down because ebay is supposed to keep your email address private. 
Comments
It's just spam. My wife gets em and she doesn't even have an ebay account.
if it isn't in your messages folder in MY EBAY, then it's bullshit.
Really? Then I have no idea. Nobody should have access to your email unless you give it to them...
Maybe they are just trying to sell you a record.
I used to send people second chance offers, saves both parties a lot of hassle.
Ebay instituted second chance offers but not the kind that you can send to someone to say 'hey I have that record you just bid too much on, let me sell it to you for less'.
Ebay obviously discourages this since they don't get a cut and they tell you that anyone who contacts you outside of ebay is probably scamming you but I've never seen that to be the case although I'm sure it happens.. but records would not be a place where I would see scammers scamming.
I do get tons of fake ebay emails. Usually you can hover your pointer over any links in the email and look at the link that comes up. While the link in the email may look like ebay, the actual link that shows in your browser bar is usually some fucked up looking URL which is obviously NOT an ebay url.
You can just contact someone through ebay though. You just look them up and there is a contact user link. The email should say it's from ebay though, I don't think you can get someone's actual email address from the ebay system. So if you got a plain email from someone not thru ebay regaurding and actual ebay item I could only imagine the seller gave out your email maybe? That is if a seller can see all bidder's email and I think they can.
I'm an ebay freak. I'll shut up now. Hope that helped somehow.
First off, these are definitely bogus. Today I received multiple emails from different people with a second chance offer on an item i just bid on. The emails contain ebay html but they just copy pieces from the original auction, they are not legitimate ebay second chance offer emails and there are no messages left in "my ebay".
As for them getting my email address....that is where my concern is. I'm wondering if someone or a group of people have cracked into ebay and figured out how to get email addresses.
I tried to offer a record to a losing bidder of a
record that I had a copy I wanted to sell a few
weeks ago, to save the hassle of listing it ... eBay
let me go through the process of writing out the message
to the second highest bidder, but when I clicked "send" I
got a message saying it would not send my message because
I did "not have an open transaction with this member"
I think if you will go to Advanced Search and search for the user then you can click on 'contact user' and say whatever you want to them. I think if you try to approach it from a finished auction and just click on a bidder's username from the list of bidders then ebay will think you are trying to make a second chance offer (which you often are) and it won't let you. Try it the other way - it should work - I think if ebay completely forbid people freely contacting each other the integrity of the whole thing would be shot.
Previous post - I think spammers probably just send the fake ebay/paypal emails to everyone. Maybe from your point of view it looks like 'wow they know I'm on ebay' but they just send it to everyone and if you are on ebay then it works better on you.. and so many millions of people are on ebay.
Having real ebay information is a new wrinkle though. Just when I was used to all the different variations of spam I'll have to be on the lookout for others.
They used to almost get me with the "Hey! WHERE IS MY ITEM! WHEN DID YOU SHIP IT!! I'M VERY ANGRY AT YOU!" emails. There is usually that one package in the back seat of my car that I'm like "OH SHIT IT'S THAT GUY"