Tips to Avoid Online Auction Fraud

While most buyers and sellers on internet auction sites are honest, there is always threat of underlying fraud.

Auction sites have had instances of sellers posting pictures of items for sale, only to include in extremely small print that buyers are only bidding for photo rather than item itself. When photo arrives in post and not product, buyers are obviously outraged.

Steps to avoid online auction fraud 1)Check seller's feedback

One of best ways to judge a seller's honesty is to check his or her feedback. Most buyers will give feedback on a sale, rating seller in seller's Feedback Profile. If feedback is negative, it will be very difficult for that seller to buy or sell anything on that auction site in future. Check seller's feedback and if it is not overwhelmingly positive, do not buy.

2)Find out seller's contact details

Before you enter into a deal, try to establish contact with seller. On eBay you can search information on a member by visiting Find Members page. If you can get a phone number or an email address, you have a better chance of solving any future problems. You could establish contact with buyer by requesting further information about nature of product in which you are interested.

3)Payment Methods

Anyone who uses email knows what Spam is!

It's annoying and time consuming to wade through volumes of fraud, con and obscene emails to filter out really important ones. And I am sure you are affected by this menace in some form or other.

How do we reduce this intolerable amounts of junk?

Here are 5 Zero-Cost tools to prevent junk cluttering your mail box. (You can access them all from a single source and info is given at end of this article.)

--* For Average Email User *--

1. Spam.N-Dream, - For POP3 Mail user.

By far this is easiest and effective solution for anyone with a POP3 email ID. For e.g. you@aol.com.

Spam.n-dream.com is a web based service that retrieves all your email for you and sends you only emails from email ID's that are pre-authenticated by you. This means, no one can send you an email unless you give prior permission.

This service is very effective - let me tell you that.

2. SpamPal, - The Desktop Solution

SpamPal is a program that sits between your email client and your mailbox, checking your email as you retrieve it.

Any email messages that SpamPal considers to be junk will be "tagged" with a special header; you simply configure your email client to filter anything with this header into a separate folder and your Spam won't be mixed up with rest of your email anymore!

--* For Website Owner *--

Posting your email address on your website is a sure way to attract junk. (e.g. support@yoursite.com)