AuctionCut

I was trying to sell a Best Buy gift card on Ebay worth $381. I received a message from "customersecurityexpert" that said I needed to provide them with the gift card number and pin number so they could make sure the card had the right balance on it because Ebay was trying to stop gift card fraud. I thought this sounded suspicious so I called Ebay and asked if this was right. The Ebay rep told me that I needed to e-mail the card and pin number. So I did. A few days later, I find out that someone spent my entire gift card on bestbuy.com. I called Ebay back and they said that since I didn't have proof that the Ebay rep on the phone told me the message was from Ebay, that they would not help me. I have the phone records that I called them and talked to them for 9 minutes. And I know they tape most of their conversations for customer service. They would not look up the recording and said that they would not refund me. They would not even transfer me to their legal department or cooperate with the police, since I had to file a report for petite larceny. So basically Ebay allowed a user to steal $381 from me and will not help me or the police to catch this person, much less let this scam be known!

Here is the message I received from "customersecurityexpert":

"Hello this message is regarding your current auction; "Best Buy Gift Card ($381.02)", item #XXXXXXXXXXX. Here at Ebay we take our customer's security very serious. If you haven't notice, we have made some minor changes to Ebay's polices prior to March 17th, 2011. Read more about it here; http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/overview.html. We have placed a payment hold on your Best Buy gift card auction. This hold limits the winning bidder from making payment to you via Paypal. This hold can be removed by having you provide us with the 16 digit Best Buy gift card code, along with the 4 digit pin for verification. Once we have obtained your information, we will contact the gift card department at Best Buy to verify that there is indeed an active balance of $381.02. This is part of our new policy for sellers using Ebay to sell gift cards exceeding $200.00 USD. Rest assure knowing that the information sent over to us is safely encrypted. -Ebay customer security expert"

If the rep genuinely told you to email the numbers that is really bad service. But where did you get the number from to call them? If it was in the message itself then you were probably calling the scammers themselves. Also how did you send the gift card numbers, via ebay messages, or email?

The message itself will stick out as a scam email to more established users, these should always be forwarded to ebay (="mailto:spoof@ebay.com">spoof@ebay.com) for verification. I can see the account from which you got the message, customerserviceexpert is no longer a registered member, which isn't really helpful for following up the incident.

Have you contacted BestBuy to see if they can provide any details of the location the card was used?