William Andrist of Country Club Hills managed to scam over twenty e-bay users into buying various items. The "lucky" auction winners paid but he never delivered.
Only recently has e-Bay shut down his account, but the damage is already done.
I lost $180 (and could have lost much more if PayPal hadn't refunded part of the full amount).
This is what happened:
On Mar 25 I bought an HP Laptop (NC 8000) for USD 713.25 (including shipping) on eBay from Mr. Andrist. The eBay auction ID was 6861841755.
I paid through PayPal on the same day. On the 26-Mar, I asked the Mr. Andrist to ship the item and send me the tracking number, and he answered that it would be shipped on the 27-Mar.
Since I didn't receive a tracking number, I recontacted the seller on the 29-Mar, and was told the day after that he will send me the number once he gets home from work.
On 01-Apr, I received an e-mail from PayPal that the item would be shipped by USPS (tracking number CP083472310US), and a tracking number. This means that, contrary to his earlier claims, the item had not been shipped yet.
The seller did not give me any information about the planned shipping date. On 03-Apr, I checked the shipping using the tracking number, and USPS could not find any such number in its system. I assumed, that the USPS was slow to update its information, so I contacted the seller to confirm, that the item finally had been shipped, but received no response.
Despite repeated atempts to contact the seller in the following days, I never received any reply. On Mar 25, I filed for buyer protection with PayPal.
On May 1st, PayPal concluded in my favor, but only managed to recover $535.31. This means that Mr. Andrist still ows me $177.94.
Since then, I only once managed to get a reply from Mr. Andrist: he wrote me an e-mail starting with the words "who do you think you are???".
Since I added negative feedback on his profile page on e-Bay, many other users with similar stories also added negative feedback
Fortunately, e-Bay now shut down his account, but we still lost our money!
Daniel
1004
Switzerland
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