A word of advice: stay away from transfers involving the N26 bank. They don’t get involved in claims and just beat around the bush.
Buy only from sites like Reverb and reputable sellers, only pay with PayPal no F&F. Ship tracked and insured.
Yes this is going beyond scamming , this is criminal activity because it is identity theft which is a crime and can put you in big financial losses.
Plan to slim down my modular setup and get back the Rytm & A4 and stubbled about this too good offer. It looks good and I got answers, but than I said I will come by car and pick it up and no answer since than. Smells also fishy for me here.
https://www.ebay-kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/elektron-analog-rytm-mkii/1451987462-74-4094
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A bank account is tight to a legal name, that’s correct. On the other side, if you transfer money to an account via IBAN, the name does not matter and must not be correctly associated so that the transaction is done successfully.
In such scam cases you will verly likey have a random name , stolen ID etc…what the Police basically can do is to make a record and normally not much happens - without a proper ID it is probably difficult to get a court related process started. I assume they have hundreds of cases every day…and they will not get much done.
The only sure thing is to contact the bank and request the money to be transfered back and this ASAP. As far as I remember it is about a week meanwhile that you can request the money back…but that may depend on your bank, so not 100% sure about that.
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ebay Kleinanzeigen also has a rating system even though it’s pretty rudimentary. If the seller has no good rating (it just goes from experience with buyers: top - ok - meh - poor) and only registered recently, I don’t even bother with it anymore. So far this tactic was successful, I even had a very pleasant transaction recently with a guy selling some FX. But obviously this doesn’t help much when the account gets hacked and the original owner of the account doesn’t realize it.
Does this seller have any ratings and since when was the account registered?
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I only do personal transactions on there. Sorry for all people who got scammed, got scammed once many years back over a laptop … was a lesson that stayed with me.
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Carolin U. from Löbach/Sachsen - sounds like the typical Rytm Mk2 user 
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Exactly… and 900€ is too good. I think I get a new one again. The pad issue is also concerning me and the big music shops don’t transfer warranty anyway.
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Yup. Was registered since 2016 with rating TOP. because like you I always check stuff like that. Seemed to be for nothing as well.
It sucks so bad that people like that make you distrust everyone in general. Like so often a few people do the damage and the majority has to pay the price for it, no matter if it’s real money or loss of trust. But also understandable when you get screwed over.
Best of luck to you guys who got scammed by this account and I hope that this person gets what it deserves. Will keep an eye on what you can report how this is being handled by the involved parties.
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Some time ago i was looking for an Octatrack MKI on Kleinanzeigen and also found a good offer.
But i was asking for a pic with the device turned on.
I received a foto from an OT MKI with a black screen. So i asked about details for the screen replacement but the seller didn’t have a clue about the modification.
After using google’s reverse image search i found exactly the same foto on elektronauts.
@vvlv i hope your bank is able to withdraw the transfer
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The seller (scammer) profile that I contacted on ebay-kleinanzeigen had “TOP” rating (whatever that means…) and has been registered since 2018. I guess it could be indeed normal in the past, but hacked now accounts?.. Hard to say now. The thing is that they lure you out of the ebay chat by asking for WhatsApp and then I guess it’s very hard to track them down this way?
Honestly, it’s first time that I got into this sort of thoroughly (all that shipment tracking issue) planned scam. Indeed it doesn’t feel so bad until you got burned on it…
This indeed takes a lot of planning to run a scam like that. Seems to be a new thing so every side involved should be contacted including DHL to „dry the swamp“ and make this type of scam impossible in the future (even though DHL is a PITA to deal with knowing from own experience because a little synth I sold over ebay Kleinanzeigen got lost during transit and now 2,5 months later the issue still isn’t resolved but instead I‘m told to do this or that which at this point seems to be a tactic to buy themselves more time before finally having to pay for it since it was insured).
There are also obvious scams on regular ebay and Amazon where shops offer gear and other products like Nintendo Switch „as new“ for a ridiculous price, have a registered business with an according number and adress, good reviews etc. but ask you to contact them via email and want to handle the payment outside of these platforms. If you order the product through the platform itself the order just gets cancelled.
Guess the only thing that really helps getting the platforms to take action is negative publicity unfortunately.
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I came across a weird scam a few years back.
I saw a couple of Nintendo Switch -games for a weirdly low price on the finnish net marketplace. I emailed the seller and we agreed that I would put money on his account, except that he asked that I’d put it on his mom’s account. He gave me a woman’s name and account number. It had a different surname than the seller himself but in these times of all kinds of family relations I thought nothing more of it.
I transferred my money (around 45€) to his mom’s account and started to wait for the post package. After maybe a week I emailed the seller and got no answer. I searched facebook with the mother’s name and found her. I sent her a message that her kid is scamming me on the internet. She was totally awestruck as she had no teenage son. She had been selling baby clothes on the same marketplace and somebody had paid her ”too much” for them. She had got a message from the baby clothes buyer that ”My husband Wolf-Rami accidentally paid you too much for the babyclothes, could you return the excess money.” which at that point was like 35€ or something. The scammers used an innocent bystander housewife from Espoo as the middleman for their elaborate scam. The account number they had given her went straight to a shady Bitcoin operation. No way to track them down.
That’s the only time I’ve been scammed through my 25 years of selling and buying all kinds of gear on the internet. Made me a lot more wary and nowadays I usually ask for a photo of the product with a recent newspaper or something similar. I only lost around 45€ and was lucky in that sense. I can’t even comprehend the amount of disappointment and anger involved in losing 800€ in the same way. My condolences to everybody who’s been a victim of such scams.
If a deal seems too good to be true, it usually is just that. Not true.
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Never do that. Just don’t do it. It certainly won’t be a legit sale and also your money will probaply be gone.
A legit seller just won’t have a reason to make you transfer money to another persons account. So yeah, just avoid it.
*Edit
Ok, it’s probaply not 100% true, that there are no reasons to use the bank account of another person - but even with this in mind, just skip the deal. It makes things too easy for a scammer and unessecarily hard for you to get the money back.
Just not worth it.
Sorry to hear your stories…
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Friends. These can be stolen banking credentials. And or stolen eBay accounts. Or stolen IG. Or fake IG. Don’t meet people from the Internet like this, especially when related to a scam or crime. You don’t know who you are meeting.
If you are going to meet them, meet at a police station.
You could literally be meeting the criminal themselves. They could be planning to mug you. They could be looking to get your identity. Maybe swipe your bank card and use your account in their next attack. May even kill you.
I’ve worked with an federal American police force once. They informed me that many scams online are organized crime. This is an area that gangs work in now, included things like tax fraud. It lets them work quickly and increases their access to all the stolen things needed to pull these off.
Just be careful and realize that your trust level with strangers is too high if you’ve already done things that don’t make sense like directly using bank accounts or payment methods outside of what platforms suggest. Now is a time to be weary of your own decision making, not to open up to more strangers in person or with more personal information.
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My wife did this math for me when I got scammed out of those 900€ I mentioned above: with all the money I’ve saved on gear that I did buy second hand, net net I still come out cash positive, despite the ripoff. So in that sense, it has been worth the “risk”.
But I basically only buy local since, living in Berlin, there’s plenty on offer - I can imagine it is not so easy to stick to local in more rural areas.
Re PayPal, someone mentioned here that their experience with PayPal on claim was dismal. My friend had a similar experience, dealing with bots and non-responsive customer service for MONTHS prior to finally recouping his money lost in a scam transaction.
I figure paying by Credit Card (or using the credit card as the source of a virtual currency transaction such as via paypal) is the way to go. Credit Card companies are experienced in dealing with fraud and usually provide features to the customer that allow them to recall/flag rogue transactions themselves. What is more, credit card companies have the facilities in place to recall transactions and they do it, different to banks, which - at least here in Germany & in the UK - do fuck all in fraud cases. The only time a bank will act is if you can prove that their security systems were breached and the damage resulted from that.
I once had my debit card stolen at Fabric, a nightclub in London. My phone was out of battery half way through the night. My friends and I stayed there till early morning and upon leaving I wanted to invite them all to breakfast. So after we ate I was going to pay and only then realised that my card wasn’t in my wallet (everything else was still there though). I didn’t think much of it. But when I came home and plugged in my phone to charge the moment it turned on the missed calls from Barclays Fraud Protection Service came pouring in. There were at least 20+ calls (it’s an automated service). I picked up to find out that in those few morning hours (from 9-11am), the thieves had lifted nearly £10,000 out of my account (shopping predominately clothing with it!!!)
Clearly the transactions had been fraudulent but Barclays spent the next three months(!) claiming that they had evidence that I had GIVEN my pin number to the thieves and that therefore the fault was with me. Incredible. That went back and fourth until I got a lawyer and he demanded them to produce evidence that supported their claim that I had offered up my PIN. What finally swung the whole thing in my favour is that he argued that their fraud protection service failed, as they had failed to lock down the account at first sign of their algorithms indicating fraudulent behaviour. So eventually they refunded me the money on that basis. Mind you I was one of their “premier customer” back then.
My point is, banks don’t give a f… about any of us and don’t expect your bank to support or protect you in any way.
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Most bank accounts are free and are very clear that any fraud or damage due to lost cards is your responsibility until you notify them of the loss. After you notify them they are responsible for any further damage. This is standard and there is no reason getting mad at a bank for this. All banks operate this way and their contracts make this very clear.
On the contrary, credit card companies make a lot, sometimes 2-3% per transaction. And interest fees. Their business model is built on quick and easy transactions and fraud protection is one of the things you get in exchange. Their contracts with merchants include the possibility that they will reverse a transaction sometimes more than a month after it happened and the merchant, if they sold a criminal physical goods, will be out the money.
Banks also regularly get hit with scams where people claim an account was stolen after the fact and must treat you as if you are scamming them. Their fraud detection is a nice thing that can help you but if you lose 100k, that’s on you, not them.
The problem with that line of thinking of getting the money back and having a bank reach back is that they don’t know you. Maybe you were hit by hard times and you are trying to scam them/the person you sent the money to. It’s easy to say “but I’m me so of course that’s not what I did” but the bank doesn’t know and if they try to reverse it because you trick them, that’s their ass on the line.
Ebay and similar sites should do a reverse image search themselves and require original photos for anything being sold as “used”. Obviously professional sellers with new products need to use stock photos sometimes, but if you’re selling secondhand gear you own, you should be able to take photos. eBay’s T&C (and copyright law!) say you can’t use somebody else’s photos.
I sold a TB-03 on reverb last year and then a week later noticed a listing on eBay using my photos. I messaged the seller and he said “lol yeah my bad, I will replace the photos when I get home tonight” but I don’t think he did. Was that a scam? Maybe. eBay were useless when I contacted them, I think they said I needed to take legal steps myself before they’d do anything.
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