I was trying to sell my camera and it was ended with Buy It Now.



The winner was from the State so in order to provide him/her the correct shipping fees I went to the post office with the camera and stuffs. I got the quote of A$66.25 deliver by Express Post International with the optional A$21 insurance. Fair right? So I sent the information to the winner.

Within a few hours I got an email from eBay saying that the bid was cancelled due to unauthorized bidding with the bidder account. Great, not the first time happen to me, I told myself, I can just relist it as eBay normally refund the previous listing fees anyway. Life moves on.

Err.. not exactly. Well, I got a few more email from "eBay" and "PayPal" claiming that the bidder has made the payment and the eBay account status has been restored. A few minutes later I got another email from "eBay" claiming that my account has been suspended. Well-done, Mr. It really gave me a 2 seconds fright. All of the emails came with a reply to email address of <aw-restore@secretary.net>, impressive. The even more impressive things are the PayPal and eBay message body itself. See below.





Apart from the fake emails from eBay and PayPal, he/she also sent me another emil with his/her updated address.

Hello

I have paid for the item and i want it shipped via Australia Post to the following address below:

Uchel Benson,
9 Oseni Street,
Lawanson
Surulere
Lagos
23401
Nigeria

Hope to hear from you soon.

Regards.

So I replied to the "bidder",

Hi,
Australia Post is now not posting anything to Nigeria without the receipient's photo ID. Can you please email/fax a copy of your passport/identity card to me so that I can complete the delivery?

And he/she did reply with a picture.

Hello
This is my pics.i have attached it.


So naturally I replied him/her with this,
Hi,
That is not good for custom. They need a photocopied/scanned ID with your current address on it. Please provide enough information and make the payment via paypal account provided in my auction. Thanks.

Hopefully he/she will get back to me and eventually made the payment. I wish.

So what is the story? EBay has been trying very hard to prevent and fight with the fraud. Paypal is now owned by eBay and they both are trying to come out with a better eMarket place for both the seller and buyer. I have no problem with any of the process they came out with, despite that there are a few weird one that I can see the reason, e.g. seller can no longer leave negative feedback to the buyer.

With all the work done, and hundreds and thousands of fraud come from Nigeria, Indonesia, South Africa (we all heard and might experienced it), there is very little they have done on it. From a IT perspectives, a simple ip trace can avoid a lot of this happening.

If the registered account is origin from Australia but the IP address lodged on the time a bid was placed was in Nigeria, that is a potential fraud. With all the advancement of the technology the check can be done within miliseconds. Too bad if the account holder is really in Nigeria, for vacation or business trip. At the end of the day, both seller and buyer get protected, it saves a lot of affords and time for both the seller and buyer to get things right again after a fraud, for my case, 5 minutes replying the emails to the "bidder", 2 seconds short fright, 1 day wasted for the listed auction and 20 minutes blogging this.

PS: Btw, my camera kits is still listing on eBay. Let me know if any of you are interested.

The story is, I was bidding on a D200 to replace my existing D60 10 days ago. I placed the maximum bids of A$800 and waited. Its came with a battery grip which sounds fair for the price. I was actually thinking it will worth more and in fact it ended at $1150.

2 hours later the seller messaged me and asked if I am still interested on the camera as the highest bidder contacted him and will not pay the item. So naturally I replied and said yes.

Next day I received a second chance offers from eBay. I bought the item and made the payment via Paypal. Dropped the seller a message to advise I had made the payment.

NOOOO replies from the seller since then. I was not too worry at first but after a few attempts of contacting the seller. I gave up. I waited for the 10 days grace period so that I can lodge a dispute to paypal. The day is today so I file a dispute and escalated it to a claim.

Hopefully the eBay buyer protection scheme is really what it claims to be. Lets wait and see.

I don't have the $$ to purchase a copy of Photoshop. SO photoshop is always not the first choise of my photo editor. Hangon, I should say, I seldom edit my pictures. The features I use most of the time, is crop, resize and medium filter for noise reduction. All those, can be found in most of the freely available software like Gimp and Paint.Net.

This morning while I was reading some of the reviews of the D700 there was a software come to my mind, Neat Image Pro . I read about it a few times in the past but never got the chance to evaluate it. So I download it and see how good it is.



I must say, I was impressed. It has a standard and advance mode where there are more settings you can play with. For my purpose, it is definately easier to use that fire up my Paint.Net.