I should have said YOU'RE DEALING WITH A SCAMMER! IGNORE ALL EMAILS FROM THE SCAMMERS. NIGERIA IS PROBABLY THE SCAM CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.
Yes I meant to yell. Ebay used to be the scammer's playground but ebay finally got wise and made it harder for scammers to do their business but they are still around.
Please be aware that scammers like to target new sellers who are selling expensive items. They figure new sellers are too naive to know ebay policies and will easily fall for their lies rather than reading ebay policies for themselves.
Never. I repeat NEVER get involved in email transactions. The purchase must be done through ebay and payment must be done through paypal (your paypal account will show the payment as complete or cleared). Scammers will send phony emails pretending to be from paypal telling you to send the item and then payment will be issued. Did they give you instructions on where to ship the item and asked you to send a tracking number? Sellers should NEVER allow buyers to dictate how they run their auctions. It is usually the scammers that do this anyway and the emails they send are usually long, contain a lot of grammatical errors and tell you some lie about why they urgently need the item like someone's birthday or someone is sick or they are doing some mission work. It's all lies.
As said before, ignore the scammer. Do not open or read any of their emails. Set your buyer requirements in my ebay, account, site preferences to block bidders in countries you do not ship to, who do not have a paypal account, who have feedback of -1 or less, who have 2 or more unpaid item strikes in the past 12 months or who have 4 or more policy violations in the past 6 months.
I'm glad you didn't fall for this very common scam.
**********************************************************************************
Non payers should get unpaid item strikes and be added to block bidders lists. Period.
