ebay scam?

Hey guys.
I recently received a mail from ebay, I'm 99.9% sure is a scam; ok there it goes:
"Hello!
I need your help. My good friend has bought a laptop from me. He want to pay me over Paypal. I can't use Paypal here. Maybe my friend could send you money over Paypal? You will resend me that money over Western Union. I will pay you $100 for that transfer. Can we do that?
Thank you!"
Now, I'd like your opinion on it. Have anyone of you received a variant of this one?
Is this really a guy lost in wonderland willing to pay for such a service?
thx.

Sounds like a variant of the Nigerian check fraud. They send you a cheque, you wait a few days waiting for it to clear. Everything looks like it is on the up and up. You forward your money to them and then later find out that the cheque did not clear and you lose your money too. Instead of a cheque, it is through Paypal. Lots of people (continue to) fall to it.
I would forward the email to PayPal security. I am sure they would like to know about this scam.

if you don't know them don't bother

thx

Report Them

He could send you the money to your Paypal account, then once you'd sent the money by WU, report you as a non shipper or similar to Paypal. They would freeze your account, and not only would you be out some money, your rep would be damaged too.

Thats why I dont use Ebay.

[ QUOTE ]
TORCH_BOY said:
Thats why I dont use Ebay.

[/ QUOTE ]

That is a rather cynical attitude. Why don't you say "this scam was trying to get your money. That's why I don't use money."

eBay is fine. The problem was not related to eBay at all. eBay may own PayPal, but it was not really PayPal's fault either.

If you want to blame something, blame human nature -- greed. It is greed that makes a person try to scam other people, and it is greed that makes a person fall for this scam.

It wouldnt hurt if Paypal agreed to let an independant third party arbitrate and settle disputes. As it is, they hold supreme power over any money thats in the Paypal system. If they decide you're a scammer or in the wrong, you have no recourse to have the matter settled by a legal body.
If banks or other financial organizations ran things this way, there'd be an public outcry.

I'd also report it to western union. They are serious about that stuff.

done;
seems that the email didn't even come from someone from ebay (although it was made to look like it did) and their intention was in part to get my reply address and spam me. The whole paypal money part was just an extra he'd get if the victim is exceptionally stupid. Plain scary, since I wanted to reply stating I'd report him if he does that again or would have replied if he used a bogus question instead of this obvious scam. From now on, I'll check the headers of all mail I get from ebay.

I got a different scam e-mail yesterday. It appeared to be from eBay, and it said that I needed to update some account information or else my account could be terminated. I knew that this couldn't be right, since I've been using eBay regularly lately, and all of my account information is current. The message gave me a link to click on to update this information, and it appeared to be just the text of an eBay URL. However, I passed the mouse over the link and could see that it was a trick; the link was actually HTML that pointed to some website that was identified by only an IP number.

I forwarded the message to eBay ([email protected]), and they confirmed that the message was indeed a fake.