I could not believe it until I read it. But there are some people getting emails from eBay buyers to pay them money or they will leave negative feedback. Image that, you get all excited to make a sale and the buyer tells you give me money or I’ll destroy your eBay business.

With eBay’s new feedback system, sellers are no longer able to leave negative or neutral feedback for buyers. All a seller can leave is positive feedback or no feedback at all. On the other hand buyers / bidders can leave positive, neutral and negative feedback. Guess who has more control now?

I read about this feedback extortion at Online Auction Trader. Here is what some eBay seller received from one of their buyer

Listen very carefully. I am the winner of this item. I have 4 other eBay Users in place either bidding on or have won items from you plus myself totaling 5.

We are prepared to leave you 5 Positive Feedbacks or 5 Negative Feedbacks depending on your actions. In a nutshell, we are in the business of selling Positive Feedbacks to eBay Sellers for $20 each, totaling $100 for 5 Positive Feedbacks.

If you purchase the 5 Positive Feedbacks for $100, you not only get to sell your items, you also receive 5 Positive Feedbacks. As you well know, Feedback is EVERYTHING to an eBay seller on whether they are successful or not.

I’m sure that you want to remain successful in your eBay business. Plus, along with the 5 Positive Feedbacks, we will also Guarantee Never to contact you again and we take you off of our list. You’ll even get a receipt for your purchase.

Now, here’s the important part.

If you refuse to purchase the 5 Positive Feedbacks, we will leave you 5 Negative Feedbacks for starters. We have 100’s & 100’s of eBay Users in place that we can use to leave feedbacks. In fact, we have enough to consistently leave you Negative Feedbacks for months resulting in you having to shut down your business.

The absolute worst thing that you can do at this point is to try and contact eBay at any time about this or refuse to cooperate; we Will start leaving you Negative Feedbacks and shut your business down.

Make no mistake, we’ve been doing this for years and have the power & resources to continually leave you Negative Feedbacks resulting in the closing of your business.

Think about this, if you try to report us to eBay and they try and suspend our account or something like that, it will not stop us whatsoever. Remember, I said we have 100’s if not 1,000’s of eBay Users in place that we can use to leave you Negative Feedbacks over & over again until you are forced to shut your business down that you worked so hard to build up.

Even if eBay were to keep suspending our user accounts, we have plenty more that we can use to keep leaving you Negative Feedbacks and there’s No way that eBay can keep up and stop us. They have tried & failed miserably. They also know about what we do. So the best and smartest thing that you can do is protect your business and just purchase the 5 Positive Feedbacks from us. That way, it’s done and over with and you can successfully continue to run your business without ever hearing from us again.

We will give you up to 72 hours from now, to reply. The sooner, the better of course. Just send us an email stating that you want to purchase the 5 Positive Feedbacks from us and let us know your main email that you use so we can contact you.

If we don’t hear from you by the end of the 72 hours, we will assume that you are refusing to cooperate and we will start leaving you Negative Feedbacks. So don’t do anything stupid. The smartest thing that you can do is take this seriously, we know what we’re doing. After we hear your reply to this email, we will contact you with further instructions.

Image how you would feel if you opened up an email from one of your buyer and read something similar. If you are like me, I first would want to curse the buyer out. You know give them a piece of my mind. Then I would get really concerned. What if the buyer is serious about his actions.

I personally don’t think this will happen. But due to eBay’s new feedback system this can possible happen. The buyer is actually more in control of your business than you are. You see Feedback and DSR are a huge part of eBay “Best Match”. Any negative feedback can actually put your listings in the bottom of the search results. Can you see all that hard work you put into making your listing just right go down the drain if you don’t pay?

I really don’t know what can be done to stop them actually doing what they propose. Granted you can file a claim with eBay and send them the email. If the seller did leave negative feedback, eBay should suspend their account and the feedback will be removed. But what happens if eBay doesn’t suspend their account due to the buyer stating they were unpleased with their transaction. Does the negative feedback stay? I’m not sure. What do you think?

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ADDED JUNE 16, 2008
eBay actually has a way to help you out. You can read it here:
What To Do If An eBay Buyer Abuses Feedback
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