My wife doesn’t own an MP3 player. I know it may come as a shock to those of you who listen to our podcast, but it’s true. She tunes in online most of the time, or listens to mine in the car.

She’s overdue for an iPod and it just happens to be her birthday in a couple of weeks. I shopped around on Ebay until I found a 2 gig Nano for about $90.00. I thought it was a pretty good deal, so I checked the seller’s approval rating (as I always do).

The rating was 100% and they had quite few previous transactions, so I trusted them. A few hours after the transaction I received an email from Ebay. The email stated that I should take action and cancel the order straight away, as they had suspended the user’s account due to previous problems (it’s not specific).

My first question is, how did this user still have an item available? Also, how did they have such a high approval rating? I panicked, but the money had already transfered from PayPal. I spoke with my credit card company, but they need more time to pass before they can put in a claim, as does Ebay.

I started to feel better when I saw the shipping tracking number had been automatically emailed to me. I tracked the package as it arrived from Singapore. The courier rang the door bell here a week or so later to my surprise. The package had arrived!

I opened it up excited and relived that it arrived in time, then discovered it’s a fake!!!

I’ll follow up with the next part of this story soon. For now I’m going to buy her one from Best Buy. Nothing beats the ol’ brick n’ mortar in times like these. I should note that I’ve never had problems with purchases on Ebay before, I’m just bummed this happened.

UPDATE: I eventually got fully refunded by PayPal. I still question how this all happened in the first place.