Ebay Buyer Sales Tax Scheme Headache!
 

Well, looks like these Ebay Sales Tax havens (ie. State of Oregon, Vault, ShipMyCards), have opened a new wormhole to create headaches for Ebay sellers.

Long story short (ok, maybe not so short), fella wins two of my auctions (about $76 bucks total) from a "ShipMyCards" address in Oregon. Pays right away, and within minutes sends me several messages stating basically "whoops, wrong shipping address, can you send to this address in Illinois instead".

I say, sure, if you change your address in Ebay. I can't just blindly ship to a different address halfway across the country with no protection.

He tells me Ebay advises that I cancel the transaction and relist so he can repurchase and put in his correct address. Me, being the accommodating fella that I am, does exactly this. Cancels the transaction due to a bad address, refunds him back his money, and relists the auctions with a BIN, and a notation on the titles that they are reserved specifically for him.

He went from communicating with me on a minute by minute basis, to crickets for the past 2 1/2 days.

I pretty quickly deduced this guy was using an Oregon address to get out of paying Illinois state sales taxes, and then having sellers divert his packages to Illinois instead.

I'm not so much upset that this guy turned into a deadbeat, but that he wasted my time and my headspace for hours on end, while I troubleshot how to fix HIS problem, not to mention the unique items I had to relist, were each re-listed TWICE by Ebay for some reason, once as the BIN I intended and once as separate auctions that I didn't catch until later, which made ME look like a POS seller who didn't know what I was doing.

All because I was trying to do the right thing.

...and this guy decides it is now acceptable for him to be a deadbeat, because his scheme to save approximately 8 bucks in Sales Tax charges (which also would have dinged me, because I have to pay final value fees on that charge), didn't come to fruition.

Rant over. :mad:

Anybody want to block this guy, just send me a PM for his ID and info.

"Never give a sucker an even break or smarten up a chump." WC Fields

If a buyer requests an address change after an item has been won, I say nothing doing. You did the right thing about not sending it to the second address.
I simply say that I am required to send to the address on file otherwise I will lose my Seller protection.
I would not have relisted the item unless I knew the buyer.

You will meet all kinds out there while selling on eBay.

Block him and move on.

i also would not accommodate someone asking for this. I had a friend sell a tag heuer watch on ebay...buyer asked for item to be sent to a diff state...which my friend did. Buyer claimed he never received watch even though he signed for it. My friend was out the watch and reimbursing the buyer.

I assume this guy gave you his correct name and actual address in Illinois. If you'd really like to get back at him, why not send a message that you believe he did what he did to you to circumvent Illinois sales and use tax laws, and that unless he immediately contacts you to explain what happened and make things right, you'll report him to the Illinois Department of Revenue as a potential sales tax fraud.

You could then actually follow up and go to the Illinois Department of Revenue website to send his info in, along with the circumstances under which you believe he's trying to get around paying Illinois sales/use tax. Just go to the website and look for the virtual assistant pop-up that should automatically appear on the site's home page, and type in the search question, "How do I report suspected sales tax fraud?" Just follow the information and options that should then come up.

Chances are the IL sales tax agents won't want to waste any time on such a small, nominal amount, but it may be enough to scare this guy from trying to pull that BS again on someone else. Good luck.

A smart tax cheat would submit a mail forward with the USPS.... I suspect there was more going on there.

Maybe, but then the person trying to get around the sales tax would have to have an actual address in a non-sales tax state to use for the USPS to forward from. Not sure that would work for a fake, made-up address, and if he used a real address, that could cause problems by having all mail forwarded from that address, not just the packages for cards he was buying.

I guess he/she could go rent an address at some mail place, or even rent a P.O. Box, but they'd have to pay money for that, which kind of defeats the purpose for dodging the sales tax to begin with, right? Also, a USPS forwarding request isn't permanent. I think it may last for 6 months, not certain though. So what would they do if the forwarding unexpectedly expired and their package went to an address it wasn't supposed to? And if someone kept trying to make continuing forwarding requests for the same address every time they expired, couldn't that draw some unwanted scrutiny from the USPS? And even if they had a friend/relative living in a non-sales tax state willing to receive packages for them, they'd have to spend more postage to get them forwarded, which again defeats the original purpose of not paying the sales tax.

Not sure what else this person could be doing, besides getting out of the sales tax. If you're suggesting they may have been trying to do something like change the address and then file a claim with Ebay for not receiving their purchase, they seller has their emails asking for the shipping change to back them up. That is exactly why I recommended that when the seller notifies them that he was thinking of reporting what they did, that he offer them the chance to contact and explain to him what happened first, on the slim off-chance there is a legit reason for what the buyer did. Not sure what other nefarious things you think this buyer could have been up to.

Or put a physical address on file of a known business.... say a hotel. They receive mail for guests all the time. Scamming addresses doesn't take a whole lot of thought. I have seen a good number of mail scams over the years. They usually start with an address change.

I don't doubt it!

It just seems like sooooo much work and effort by the buyer in the OP's case to save a few dollars on sales tax. Why bother going to all that technically illegal hassle and trouble for less than $10? Unless.......maybe the buyer didn't want the purchase after all, and thought this might be a way to get the seller to drop it and get out of it without a non-payer black mark?

I was thinking more along the lines of the buyer was looking to get the entire purchase for free.

I understand, but thought I addressed that when I mentioned in an earlier post how the seller would have the buyer's email as evidence to show Ebay he requested the address change.

Problem would be that after eBay turned down the buyer, the buyer could then tell either PayPal or his credit card that he didn't receive anything and they would probably believe him without giving the seller a chance to provide any evidence to the contrary like eBay could do.

Interesting story. Thanks for sharing. I probably would have made the same mistake but now thanks to you, I won’t.

Definitely don’t mess with the guy. Not worth making unknown enemies over small $.

Now you do have a point there, but why even bother with the address change then? He can just claim he didn't get it.

And why did he have the original address going to a state without sales tax? If he wasn't planning to pay anyway, what difference does the sales tax make? I assume if you file a claim and get refunded the purchase price, it would include the sales tax since the sale technically never occurred then. Unless Ebay and Paypal are doing something that I wouldn't expect.

The fact that the buyer specifically used a non-sales tax state for his Ebay shipping address of record sure points to sales tax maybe having something to do with his scheme. Just saying, and have to agree with the OP along that line of thinking.

I don't get it. Just how much sales tax could be on $76? How much does it cost to re-ship an item from one location to the other? To me, that's just too much hassle for a $76 item.

Fred, That's part of the question, why would someone do all this for not really much of anything? The whole thing makes very little sense.

People sell forged autographed common cards for a couple buck each. We had a member switching out T206 cards in modern Topps holders to make a few extra dollars a card.

The part of low ball scams I don't get is how many think scammers are not into scamming on very low end items. You can get scammers on anything from 50 cent items to super high end watches.

This purchase was only $76, but that doesn't mean he isn't buying higher priced cards and trying to do the same thing.