Too Good to Be True

Three years ago, Doug and I were planning a driving trip to Alaska. We didn't want to have to keep to the rigid schedule that would be required if we had to have hotel reservations for every night, so we looked into renting an RV. An RV would give us the freedom to make the trip at our own pace, the ability to stay a day here, a couple of days there, depending on the sights we might want to see in any given area. However, the cost of renting an RV for the several weeks that we expected to be traveling was prohibitive.

So I started shopping for an RV on the internet.  I should mention that neither of us had ever done any camping of any sort, and we knew absolutely nothing about RVs. Anyway, I found one about four hours away, and we went to look at it. It was a Class C motorhome, 20 feet long from bumper to bumper, on a 14-year-old Chevy chassis. We bought it, brought it home, cleaned it up, fixed it up, asked lots of friends lots of questions about RVing, and hit the road for Alaska.

Harvey, the RV

The trip was not a pleasant experience for Doug. Harvey, as we called the RV, proved to be a little difficult to handle; and Doug opted to do all the driving. When we returned home, we cleaned it up and fixed it up again and sold it on eBay.

Fast forward to this year. It's been my thought that Doug would have had a different opinion of traveling by RV if we'd had a more modern unit for our trip, so I've never stopped looking at RVs that might persuade him to try it again. This summer, I was watching for the perfect RV to come up on eBay; and one did pop up that was almost exactly what I had in mind. It was a bank repossession, so I thought it might go for a low price. Doug said I could bid $15,000 for it. I did, but that didn't even meet the reserve. I watched for the duration of the eBay auction and saw that it eventually sold for over $38,000.

Fast forward again to this week. On Tuesday, I received an eBay e-mail stating that we were being given a second-chance offer to purchase that RV for the price we had bid on it. I told Doug about it; and, even though he really didn't want another RV, he recognized that that was a phenomenal price for this 2008 model. It was located about three hours away, and we didn't have any plans for that day; so we got ready to go see it. Just before we walked out the door, I decided to call the contact number on the original eBay listing, just to be sure that someone would be there to show us the RV when we arrived.

Well, to our dismay, an employee of the repossession agency that had listed the RV on eBay back in July told me that we were being scammed. The RV we were coming to look at had been sold in July and was no longer available. In fact, he said that our call was the second such call he had received that morning.

We were so disappointed. Well, I was disappointed. Doug's disappointment was tempered with relief.

I contacted eBay and sent them a copy of the second-chance e-mail. They confirmed that it was a scam and reminded me that, whenever they send me an e-mail, they also put a copy into my eBay message inbox. I went there and looked; and, sure enough, there was no copy of that message we had received. The scammer was good at creating a very legitimate-looking e-mail.

I should have known better. I guess I fell victim to my own greed. I knew the offer was too good to be true, but I wanted to believe it. I did click on two links in the e-mail, which is a very dangerous thing to do in an e-mail from an unknown sender. One link took me to the original eBay listing; the other took me to an e-mail screen to communicate with the sender. Fortunately, we don't think any harm was done. Our computer seems healthy. I think the worst that happened is that the bad guy got our e-mail address. I had planned to change that soon anyway.

May our experience help someone else to avoid falling victim to a similar scam.