Video Game Scams

Going through websites like eBay and Amazon, I've come across a lot of really fishy video game offers. Of course, the offers are really great and you'll always want to believe them, but there's always something in the back of your mind telling you that it's too good to be true (and that's because it normally is). A few months back I was searching for a video game that I just adored when I was a kid, but I couldn't find it anywhere. Finally, after about an hour of searching I found two results for the game. One was in perfect condition and starting out at $200, so there's no way I would even try for that, and then there was another listing for the same game, but with the cover art, no booklet, and minor scratches on the disc, but they guaranteed it still worked. The catch was that the game was only listed for one dollar and it came with two other games in the same condition. I thought, hey, what's one dollar? I really wanted the game, so I decided I'd just try it out and if it was a scam, it's just a dollar. I've got more of those.

After paying and waiting for over three weeks for the games to arrive, I put the game I searched for into my system, tried to run it, and nothing. I looked and the bottom of the disc and it looked like someone ran over the disc with a lawnmower and then melted it back together then stuck a new sticker on the top. The other two games were the same. When I tried to contact the person who sold me the game, they informed me that there's no way it could be in such bad condition so it's not their fault. They refused to give me a refund. Like I said, it's not that horrible since it was just a dollar, but still it really got on my nerves.

I researched the seller a little more and it turns out that they sell over six hundred items a day ranging from $1-$10, and most of their reviews are negative. I'm never going to fall for such a ridiculous scam again. Let this be a lesson to all of you who shop online, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. If you want to be persistent and buy it anyway, maybe do a little research so you know you're not just funding a bunch of scam artists.

Has anyone had any similar experiences like this?

 

A lot of the times, yes, people won't buy from people that have really bad reviews, but there are some people, like kids with giftcards, who don't understand how Ebay works (and yes, it was Ebay), and they'll go through the site and just pay for whatever's cheapest. I would assume that after a certain number of bad reviews they'd not be allowed to sell anymore, but what I think they did is hire other people or create other accounts to leave user reviews and product reviews that aren't completely negative.

I've never had any problems with Amazon other than them just taking months and months to ship and then having the product be slightly damaged due to bad packaging. The reason why I didn't get the refund is because the seller demanded that I send the item back in order to get a refund. Since I didn't have the money to send anything and I wasn't willing to spend more than what I'd be getting back, I just didn't bother. Yes, I could have definitely contacted Ebay to get them to pay me back, but that wasn't worth the trouble since I don't think the seller would have been the one to give the money back. I just wanted to post this here to let people know that they should do their research on the sellers before buying things on Ebay, since the scammers can actually pretty easily get away with things like that.