Scam Buyer Lessons Learned: Spectral Tiger
First article in a series about real experiences fighting scammers
It occurred to me as I read social media discussions about scammers and problem buyers that the strongest learning on this topic comes from experience, and that I can share some absolute humdingers and provide my paid-exclusive subscribers with the playbook of my own beats, like Joey Knish tried to do for Mike McDermott. I figured I’d kick off this series with the time a scammer tried to get me for almost a grand.
I’ve been on eBay since around 1997, and have had my current eBay account since August 2000, making it almost old enough to rent a car. It is in absolute grandfathered God mode, able to take enormous payments and get disbursed right away, without the long escrow, and able to list anything in any category. Part of my personal capitalization into Desert Sky Games in 2012 was bringing my ongoing eBay business to be a component of the new company. As such, despite eBay largely being a junk dump, the platform served for some amount of sales volume for most of the 11+ years that DSG was in business.
So it was that circa 2013-2014, we did a lot of business in World of Warcraft TCG singles on eBay. Yeah! Anyone remember that TCG? The WoWTCG had scratch-off “loot” cards with codes that gave access to character mounts in the online game. Most of these were not especially valuable. Spectral Tiger, the one-per-case hit from their Fires of Outland expansion, was one of the exceptions.
Today, loot cards are supposedly still redeemable, if you can find anyone playing World of Warcraft, which I imagine you probably could. A Spectral Tiger today, as of this writing, unscratched, will set you back three grand or more. At the time we sold the cat shown in the photo above, the going market price was only around $750. A veritable bargain!
But of course we had a buyer who wanted an even greater bargain: He wanted the Spectral Tiger mount for free. He determined that he would abuse the eBay return system in an attempt to get one at our expense.
What happened and what did we learn from this? Read on!