Our First Online Sale Was to a PayPal Scammer – Don’t Do What We Did!

Please Never Forget About Robin Peoples

Oh, how we enjoyed performing the Dance Of Joy upon our first online sale!

Finally, after months of slogging it out in the world wide trenches, my wife Kathy and I had made our first online sale.

Man, what a tremendous emotion of achievement that was, like drinking the first sweet water from a very deep and potentially dry well.

Thankfully for us, we resisted instantly contacting each of our detractors individually so we could chant: “We told you so – na, na, na, na, naa, na.”

A Twinkling of Idiocy

Hands Up – who likes to be “taken for a ride?”

If you are like most folks, being played for a fool is not on your To Do list and that is precisely why I have written this article. All that is required is that you familiarize yourself with how we got taken to the cleaners and the same tactic that worked so well on us will be useless against you.

Here is a slap by slap description of how we were hood-winked: (it’s pretty sad so grab a tissue…)

1. Six months into our fledgling online business we received an email contact through our website. The yahoo email account owner inquired about the quality of our product. He says he is from the UK.
2. We respond with the information he is seeking and he asks for our PayPal email.
3. He orders a wallet. It is not for him, he says, it is for his friend in another country and he supplies the address for delivery.
4. Within minutes of dude’s last email we get another email from PayPal asking us to supply tracking info for the order so funds being held can be deposited into our account.
5. Right after the clinking of glasses we rush to send the wallet by registered mail and get a tracking number.
6. Back at home we enter the tracking number to go to PayPal’s site but it does not work.
7. Only then did we notice an extra period in PayPal address link.
8. We realize we have been scammed and try to stop the package from being sent. The fellow from Canada Post guesses correctly that we have sent our wallet to Nigeria. He says the folks over there seem to be getting a lot of gifts from small online business people. He says this old scam only works once but there are a lot of first timers. We thank him for the insight and toast to his name.
9. We contact PayPal who are well aware of this scam. More time is spent licking our wounds by contacting Yahoo. They know, too. We are the only ones in the dark.
10. This fraud was able to occur because it was our first sale and we did not know that all funds from PayPal go directly into our account without first having proof of shipping.
    

    

    And Don’t Forget Gratuities

University Costs Money

As soon as we were done crying, we were able to laugh at being ripped off for our first online sale and quickly became grateful that the lesson only cost us one wallet and $19.00 in shipping.

It is a great deal of wisdom for very little investment and with any luck at all, it will cost you even less. Please make your first online sale something you can repeat, not something to be avoided.

It is a much better tune you can dance to more often.

Thank you, friend.

Barry Out

http://www.ducthide.com/ducthide_story.html – fortunately for us, our second online sale was legit and DuctHide Tough Wearables is now the largest handmade duct tape wallet company in the world. And we Love Nigeria!