Ebay Buyer Sales Tax Scheme Headache!

[D. Bergin]

Well, looks like these Ebay Sales Tax havens (ie. State of Oregon, Vault, ShipMyCards), have opened a new wormhole to create headaches for Ebay sellers.

Long story short (ok, maybe not so short), fella wins two of my auctions (about $76 bucks total) from a "ShipMyCards" address in Oregon. Pays right away, and within minutes sends me several messages stating basically "whoops, wrong shipping address, can you send to this address in Illinois instead".

I say, sure, if you change your address in Ebay. I can't just blindly ship to a different address halfway across the country with no protection.

He tells me Ebay advises that I cancel the transaction and relist so he can repurchase and put in his correct address. Me, being the accommodating fella that I am, does exactly this. Cancels the transaction due to a bad address, refunds him back his money, and relists the auctions with a BIN, and a notation on the titles that they are reserved specifically for him.

He went from communicating with me on a minute by minute basis, to crickets for the past 2 1/2 days.

I pretty quickly deduced this guy was using an Oregon address to get out of paying Illinois state sales taxes, and then having sellers divert his packages to Illinois instead.

I'm not so much upset that this guy turned into a deadbeat, but that he wasted my time and my headspace for hours on end, while I troubleshot how to fix HIS problem, not to mention the unique items I had to relist, were each re-listed TWICE by Ebay for some reason, once as the BIN I intended and once as separate auctions that I didn't catch until later, which made ME look like a POS seller who didn't know what I was doing.

All because I was trying to do the right thing.

...and this guy decides it is now acceptable for him to be a deadbeat, because his scheme to save approximately 8 bucks in Sales Tax charges (which also would have dinged me, because I have to pay final value fees on that charge), didn't come to fruition.

Rant over.

Anybody want to block this guy, just send me a PM for his ID and info.