It wasn’t nice & it wasn’t easy. I was trying to find a 20d at a good bargain on Amazon.com – Instead I bumped into the nasty Amazon 20D scam. Along the way, I ordered more than 10 cameras from more than 10 different sellers. Each and everyone canceled the amazon order & contact me offline via e-mail requesting my shipping info to complete the detail. Here’s how it went down… I would get a cancelation e-mail from “amazon”. The e-mail would explain that the seller has gone over the finiancial limit for the month and another means of payment would complete the transaction. The requested payment method was Western Union Wire Transfer.
Wire Transfer? I didn’t think much of it at first, the “amazon” e-mails looked legit. At closer inspection, they’re phony, and the only way you could tell was by looking at the e-mails long headers which show you where the e-mail was sent from. I looked and sure enough, these e-mails were not coming from the same smtp.amazon.com that every other amazon e-mail comes from. These were fake e-mails trying to get me to wire transfer money to some dude in Romania so that he could walk off with my money and send me nothing. Disgusting, i know. Did I mention that these cameras (20d’s which retail at over $1,500) were priced in the $365-500 range. I was hopeful, very hopeful that I could actually snag one at this price, but wire transfer was out of the question.
So I placed one order after another – through amazon – If the order got canceled, I tried again with another seller. In all, I placed easily more than 10 orders, all getting canceled. A few times after the cancelation I would get the offline email from the seller requesting my info, I eventually noticed alot of these sellers were the same person. In all I had more than $3500 pending transactions in my bank account. I just kept trying though.
I got one! I found a real seller, got the camera (with the crappy kit lens) for $500. It was a disturbing experience, but hey, got a good deal. Hopefully this thing is “like new” as advertised once it shows up at my door, but I went through amazon, and if it’s not as advertisied i’ll get the a-z guarentee. I’m thinking this one person selling at $500 had to be influenced by the fraud prices he saw on all the other cameras.
Man, disgusting experience. Beware of theoldseller@yahoo.com – He’s full of shit, and that’s the moral of my story.