red hot, idiotic and furious

Warning: upcoming extreme rage

I hate ebay. I hate the people who use it and I hate for the most part the general idiot scammers/spammers who troll in that vicinity. I started using ebay about 5 years ago, buying camera equipment, film equipment, a gorgeous Alexander McQueen dress, a bikini. I was disappointed various times with the items, but, on the whole, I found that as a trading place, ebay had enough stopholds to make an online auction work in the end. Today, these stopholds are not functioning.

In the last 3 months, I purchased a digital camera, for the insanely low price of 90EU. A half-decent camera I might add. After jerking my chain, sending me payment details, names, bank accounts, the seller promptly fled after the payment went through. Of course I immediately filed complaint. The complaints department is now grinding through the formalities, and I should be getting my cheque in the mail sometime next year.

Yesterday, the auction ended for my phone, the Nokia 9300 I'm trying to sell. Now, while getting an auction backfire is obviously less costly than getting ripped off, I might remind you that it's around 8 EU down the drain. I am severely irritated. Plus, I was hoping to finish this piece of business before flying off. Looks like the husband is now going to have to take care of this... if he remembers.

Oh, and this is how the auction backfired: The bidding went up to 500EU, which surprised me. The highest bidder was a first time bidder. No comments, yahoo/gmail/hotmail type email, location only listed as France. That alone I find alarming. Then, 30 minutes before the auction ends, another first time buyer bids. This time, it's worse. Not only the same kind of anonymous email, but no proper address. Needless to say, there has been no mail/contact made since the auction ended. This doesn't surprise me. Obviously what we have is a fucking idiot who chickened out of a bid.

Now, I don't know who they have working in ebay, but this has got to stop. There has to be proper address and identity verification. It's an auction, for goodness sakes. Money changing hands. If I don't get some serious action from ebay on this, I'm going to fucking close the whole account down and never use the bugger again. Ebay is too slack to conduct business.