9 days ago I bought a HomePod on eBay. The guy had 0 feedback, but hey, everyone has to start somewhere. I won, I paid, easy.
10 mins later he messaged me to say that he’s been called away with work and he wouldn’t be back until Sunday just gone, but he would post in on Monday. Not ideal, but I can wait. He said he would arrange a courier collection and I’d get a tracking code that evening but obviously it wouldn’t work yet. Got the tracking from the eBay Packlink service like he said.
Monday comes around and I get another message from him to say that it’s been collected and to thank me for being patient blah blah blah.
All the messages from him have been with decent English and seemed like a genuine guy. People have delays in life and work gets in the way, especially at the moment so I just gave him the benefit of the doubt.
The tracking code he gave me hadn’t updated anything, but last night I went to eBay to see if there was any update and the listing has been removed, he’s been removed from eBay and it says to “go to your messages”
No message from eBay, but it says I can start a case when it’s been two weeks.
My thought process goes into two parts here (Do this need @Peter_G for a poll?!)
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Obviously it’s a scam. He delayed you so he could run away to the Maldives with £200
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New user, popular item, not delivered yet, tracking number had no progress and that’s enough flags for eBay to suspend him.
A tiny part of optimistic me thinks it might turn up today still. But 
Does anyone have any experience of the tracklink service from eBay and how it works? I’ve got a tracking code but I can’t do any real investigation as I need his email address which I don’t have and putting the number into the Parcel app doesn’t give anything either.
What I don’t understand is that if he’s just out to scam me, why say it would be a week? Just ignore me or say “It’ll be tomorrow” and I’m non the wiser? What did the week get him? I know PayPal sometimes stops you withdrawing but I think that’s related to the item arriving. He didn’t list anything else and it was an auction for 7 days, so not like he listed it up at under market value and got a quick BIN and ran away into the sunset.
