Possible scam?

[mactots]

Hey guys. I just got a sale and was preparing a shipping label. The buyers info looked bizarre, and upon googling the address I uncovered a landfill of people claiming it as a scam. Just wondering if anyone else has dealt with this apparent infamous scam address? I've yet to ship the item and will probably just cancel the order and relist it.

[snoopwiz]

It is a mail forwarding location, for the most part for buyers in Russia. The "bizarre" portion of the address may simply be your buyers "i.d." code with the forwarder. Very common in this sort of practice.

On a personal level, I have shipped to that address, just once, and it was a while ago, Sept 2018. No problems though....my buyer received his package from me in good shape, in good time.

 I can't speak about the issues you found on your on-line search. Hopefully other sellers will come and chime in with either their good or bad experiences.

[pjcdn2005]

I have shipped to a lot of forwarding services, some of them in that city and haven't had a problem. Keep in mind that people generally post when they have had a problem so you may see that there are 50 posts from people having had a problem at that address but there may have been 5000 people in the same time period who had a positive experience and didn't post about it.

There is a chance of having to deal with a dishonest person whether the buyer is shipping with a forwarder or whether they are in the same country as you.  I do have to mention that camera/camera parts and any type of electronics do seem to have a larger amount of 'bad' transactions than other categories but again..that could happen regardless of where you ship.

Keep in mind that if you have delivery confirmation to the payment address the buyer cannot claim an inr and if they claim an item as not described, you are only responsible for return shipping from the address that you shipped to.  In some cases ebay will deny the MBG to buyers who used a forwarding service to ship their item though I don't know if that is a for sure thing these days.

[marnotom!]

As the others have posted, it’s not the address in and of itself that’s a problem.  You need to try to suss out the buyer and figure out what their intentions are, and this is true no matter where or how you're shipping.

If I was overly concerned about a C$55 sale that had no eBay seller protections associated with it because of my choice of shipping method, I'd be trying to get a sense if the buyer was using a hijacked eBay account and/or going on a buying spree with a fraudulently obtained credit card number.  I'd be checking to see if I could get a sense of this user's recent buying history, and to see if their home country (rather than the USA) shows up on their feedback card.  (If it does, I'd take that as a good sign, BTW.)

Or I'd upgrade the shipping at my own expense to something online-trackable and chalk it up as a learning experience.

Or, if there's nothing fishy about the buyer or sale given the limited amount of detective work I could do here, I'd take the chance and ship it as a possible C$55 isn't going to ruin my business.

[reallynicestamps]

The biggest problem with freight forwarded shipments is that the buyer's PP is probably not Canada based.

That means you are paying PP a higher rate (3.9% I think) than you would for a Canadian or even US based account.

Much of the Money Back Guarantee does not apply once the shipment reaches the forwarder, especially if it is tracked.

Even customs frauds* don't work because most forwarders make those costs part of their fees.

EBay has its own forwarding service called the Global Shipping Program, which they set up to offer strong Seller Protections to sellers nervous about shipping internationally.

*The buyer claims non-delivery, gets his refund because the shipment is held by customs, then picks it up and pays only the applicable duty on a high value product.