Private Deals With Online Sellers Can Easily Go Awry

Though it grows safer all the time, purchasing through the Internet still can be a little risky. It gets very risky when you go outside the established channels and try to make private deals with those you encounter on the Web.

This column is about two teenage girls in the Pomona Valley and a Ventura County man who all started using EBay, the biggest online auction house, but then left it and accepted transactions with people who didn’t deliver what they were paid for.

By the time these readers wrote me for help, it was too late. They could make scant or no contact with those who took their money, and they apparently have little recourse. There’s a warning here for everyone.

Louise Aledia, 16, and Jet Maniaol, 14, who are cousins, had saved their allowances to buy concert tickets. They wanted to go to an Aug. 8 performance of the pop singing group Hanson at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles.

The list price of the tickets was $29.75 each. But, after trying to buy them on EBay, the teenagers sent a money order for $460.75 to the auctioneer, Blast Magazine, at an address in Ohio. They never got the two scalped tickets.

Eventually, Aledia says, they bought from a ticket broker in L.A., paying $400. But when they went to the theater, they found many scalpers roaming outside, and they now recognize they may have been able to buy the tickets for far less.

Times pop music writer Geoff Boucher says the price the girls paid was “stunningly high.”

EBay has safeguards against auctions going awry, including a “feedback” system where users can see online what others have had to say about their experiences with individual sellers, an escrow account to hold payments until the goods are delivered, dispute resolution and even free insurance up to $200 with a $25 deductible.

But, according to Kevin Pursglove, an EBay spokesman, all these lapse when someone deals off the Net with the seller.

After bidding on EBay, the girls got an e-mail from BlastMagEditor, otherwise unsigned, saying, “No one came through on the auction,” but they could still buy tickets.

A second e-mail said, “If you want them and can have payment here no later than Friday [July 21], I will sell for $500.” Later, they were told the seller would accept $450 plus a small handling charge.

The next e-mail, on July 20, was ominous. It said to send payment to Columbus instead of Delaware, Ohio, and that the seller was soon moving to California. “Please have payment here within three days and include u [sic] own shipping cost. . . . Please not [sic] payment must be received by Saturday. NO REFUND GUARANTEED if not reached by date stated.”

The teenagers sent the money order, but when no tickets arrived, Aledia’s father, Nonnie Apilado, got involved, sending increasingly frantic appeals, first for the tickets, and then, after the concert passed, for a refund.

The last message Apilado got back was signed only “Karen.” It said Blast wasn’t responsible for refunds, but the firm Prime Tickets was, no address given.

“Please contact them not me cause I cannot do anything about it anymore,” Karen said.

In his appeal for help, Apilado said he couldn’t find Prime Tickets.

Neither could I, despite many calls across the country, nor could I contact anybody at Blast, assuming “Karen” even worked there.

Blast has a Web site, but it contains no street address, no phone number and only e-mail addresses, none of which responded to me.

The Delaware Police Department said it had no record of a Blast office in its city, and there were no listed telephone numbers for it either there or in Columbus.

Frankly, I may be behind times, but I wouldn’t buy from anyone without a phone number or street address to contact if anything went wrong.

Aledia told me she and Maniaol are taking this experience in stride and had learned from it. Aledia’s father is angrier.

The second complaint about an unconsummated buy straying from EBay into private territory was from Robert Succa of Oak Park.

“I bid on a ‘box lot of pocket watches’ and was the second highest bidder,” Succa wrote. “The day after the auction closed, I was contacted by the seller, who informed me that for unforeseen reasons the high bidder was unable to complete the transaction and would I be interested as the second highest bidder to purchase. . . .

“I sent a cashier’s check in the amount of $2,000 to an address in New York, and that was the last I heard from the seller. Repeated attempts at e-mail were unsuccessful, the phone number listed on EBay rang continuously at all hours of the day and night.”

Succa said later he opened EBay’s feedback files looking for other auctions by the same person and found 35 other people who had purchased nonexistent merchandise from her. He and others have now contacted the New York Police Department, and a fraud investigation is underway, which may soon lead to an arrest.

Pursglove, the EBay spokesman, was not very sympathetic toward Succa and other buyers who had embarked on private dealings with someone they first found on EBay.

“This is probably one of the biggest sources of complaints we get,” he said. “But we have to maintain the system. Otherwise, everybody could just be trading offline.”

But Succa responded, “I assumed that was the way it was done. This was the first bid I had ever made on EBay. When I got the message, I assumed it was normal. I didn’t know I was outside the Web.”

Now, he said, he understands EBay’s view. Still, he feels, “They are technically right, perhaps, that it was done out of EBay, but had I not bid on the items on EBay I would never have come into contact with that person.”

I can sympathize with the victims of these scams, but we all ought to learn just how necessary it is to be wary of phony approaches.

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Ken Reich can be contacted with your accounts of true consumer adventure at (213) 237-7060 or by e-mail at ken.reich@latimes.com.