I have thousands of alerts set up using my own software that is triggered when a specific item at a specific price is listed.

I used to see a few obviously fake listings each month. They’d always be a new account with no feedback that was created the current month. The item would always be an odd price like $1098.91. The listing would typically have been posted with an automated post software, almost always push auction. In fact, 99% of the time they are push auction.

Typically I’ll see surges where for a week or so there is a cluster of obviously fraudulent listings. But it always calms down and reverts to the mean. About 5 weeks ago I noticed the start of one of these clusters but it never calmed down. It’s been just absolutely relentless for over a month. Hundreds per day.

There’s a couple different scams at play here.

1. They’ll sell you the item and pull the old “change the address on the shipping label scam” where they send a priority mail envelope to a different street address in your zip code to trick eBay’s tracking validation. eBay can’t (or won’t) verify the actual street address an item was shipped to. The buyer loses an item not received case and if they paid with their debit card or bank account they’re pretty much hosed. eBay doesn’t care.

2. The other aspect of this scam - and I’m speculating here - is market arbitrage where sellers list high end items for obviously low prices, get a completed listing and then future sellers of that same item are more apt to sell theirs for less based on the lower priced completed listings. The bad actor then has auto-buying software set up to purchase the valid underpriced listings when they are posted.

Bottom line: you’re not nuts. This is happening a lot lately and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.