It seemed too good a bargain to miss, a spanking new Bugaboo baby buggy, the favorite of fashion-conscious parents, for less than half the normal price.
Yusuf Hatia and his wife Sarah Taylor, who are expecting their first child, were among the many who spotted the offer on the Internet auction site eBay and dashed off an email expressing their interest.
But, of course, as the consumer experts are always at pains to stress, if it seems like too good a bargain to be true, it probably is.
Hatia, a 32-year-old marketing consultant in the UK, and Taylor, 30, a teacher, were drawn into a simple but clever scam involving fake websites and COD emails.
They are not alone. There have been many hundreds of cons across the world in which eBay bargain hunters have been ripped off.
The potential dangers were highlighted this week when it emerged that a teenager from south Wales tricked site users out of ?45,000 by promising them electrical goods which turned out not to exist.
But the fraud does not stop there. The virtual auction house, beloved of the wife of the British prime minister who used it to buy designer shoes, has become an online flea market for illicit goods ranging from pirate music to antiquities of dubious origins.
The company insists it is doing all it can to clamp down on the sale of illegal goods -- it told The Guardian newspaper that only this week it caught a person who was trying to illicitly trade a very large hoard of coins.
But eBay acknowledges that its size -- it has 114 million users across the world and 10 million items on sale at any one time -- makes it difficult to police.
Not all are convinced it is doing enough. One expert in pirate DVDs, whose job involves liaising with the company, said: "On the one hand eBay is willing to cooperate when it is pointed out that something is not right but it does not seem to be very proactive about nailing the bad guys."
Hatia's and Taylor's case is a good example of how buyers hoping for a cut-price deal are tempted away from the relative safety of the site.
After expressing his interest in the buggy via the site, Hatia, of east London, was contacted directly -- not through eBay -- by the supposed seller and offered a red Bugaboo "Frog" for US$550. The "seller" told him she would hand over the buggy to the carrier, TNT.
It would notify Hatia when it had the buggy and he would send the cash to her via the transfer service Western Union and give TNT the payment details.
Once TNT had delivered the buggy, he would instruct the carrier to release the payment information so she could collect the money.
The trick in such cases is that the real, respectable TNT carrier is not involved at all. Emails purporting to come through TNT come straight from the con artists. The links to sites which are included on the "seller's" email are to fake TNT sites created by the fraudsters. The victim is releasing the payment details straight to those behind the deception.
Hatia became suspicious and pulled out. As a marketing expert he sees the skill in tempting him with a clever choice of product.
TNT has come across around 40 such cases in the UK, involving a range of goods. The giant US carriers have received many hundreds of complaints.
Garreth Griffith, head of safety for eBay in the UK, said only 0.01 percent of the transactions carried out on the site could be confirmed as fraud.
He had not come across the TNT scam but pointed out there were warnings on eBay about the dangers of trading off-site and sending money by electronic transfer.
Griffith said 1,000 people around the world worked on security issues for eBay. High- and low-tech innovations were continually being introduced to make fraud more difficult.
But the bottom line for the company is that buyers in the virtual world should use the same common sense they would use in a street market.
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