I tried to get scammed on eBay and it did NOT go how I expected... (PART 1)
**Intentionally Overpaying for a "Scammy" MacBook: A Step-by-Step Investigation**
In today's video, I embark on an unusual journey: intentionally overpaying for what appears to be a scammy MacBook on eBay. My goal is to expose shady sellers and their tactics by taking the plunge and purchasing one of these questionable devices. If you haven't seen it yet, head over to [Privacy.com/lukeME](https://privacy.com/lukeME) for a free $5 credit when signing up. But let's dive into the details.
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### Identifying the Scam: What You Need to Look For
The listing in question is for a "15-inch Apple MacBook Pro Intel 8GB 1TB 3-Year Warranty Mac OSX 2015." At first glance, there are several red flags:
1. **The Use of 'Intel':** While modern MacBooks have transitioned to Apple Silicon (M1/M2 chips), older models still use Intel processors. However, the mention of "Intel" without specifying the processor type (e.g., Core i5 or i7) raises suspicions. This MacBook is likely from 2010-2012, which makes it a relic by today's standards.
2. **Mac OSX 2015:** Another classic trick used by shady sellers is listing older MacBooks as "upgraded" to newer software versions. Searching for "MacBook Pro 2015" reveals that this model doesn't actually exist—it’s simply an old MacBook with outdated specs being marketed as new.
3. **False Advertising:** The seller claims the MacBook has been upgraded to current specifications, which is a clear case of false advertising. Taking a 7-11 year-old MacBook and claiming it's a newer model with upgraded features is deceptive.
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### Preparing for the Purchase: Using Privacy Comm
To avoid using my actual credit card information, I turn to [Privacy.com](https://privacy.com). This service allows me to create virtual credit cards with custom spend limits. For this purchase, I set a $600 limit to ensure no unauthorized charges can be made beyond that point.
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### The Purchase and Unboxing Experience
After placing the order for the $558 MacBook, I eagerly (or nervously) await its arrival. Upon receiving it, I realize my initial assumption was correct: the MacBook is a relic. It includes an external DVD drive, charger extension, and other配件 that weren’t mentioned in the listing.
However, there’s a twist—the unboxing reveals a retina MacBook Pro with a 1TB SSD, dual-core i7 processor, and low battery cycles. This contradicts the seller's description of it being an older, non-retina model. The inclusion of these upgraded parts raises more questions than answers.
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### Investigating the Seller’s History
To uncover the truth, I dive into the seller’s history. Whitman Technologies, the seller in question, appears to be part of a larger group (Key Group) known for running multiple eBay accounts and selling overpriced, misdescribed MacBooks. Their listings often emphasize high-end features like retina displays and SSDs while charging exorbitant prices.
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### A Second Test: Purchasing Again with Different Credentials
To further validate my theory, I decide to purchase another MacBook from the same listing but use a different email address and shipping details. This ensures that the two purchases are completely independent. If both MacBooks are identical, it would confirm that the seller is indeed misrepresenting their products.
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### Conclusion: Exposing eBay Scammers
This video serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of buying from untrusted sellers on eBay. By identifying red flags and taking proactive steps like using virtual credit cards, consumers can protect themselves from falling victim to these scams.
As I wrap up this investigation, I’m left with mixed emotions—part excitement for uncovering the truth and part frustration at the unethical practices being perpetuated. In the next video, I’ll reveal the results of my second purchase and provide insights into how others can avoid similar pitfalls.
Thank you all for watching, liking, commenting, and subscribing. If you have any questions or want to share your experiences with eBay scams, feel free to join my subreddit or follow me on Twitter [@LukeVianney](https://twitter.com/LukeVianney). Stay tuned for more updates!
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This article follows the full transcription of the video, providing a detailed and engaging account of the journey. Each section is developed from the transcription to ensure clarity and readability while maintaining all the original content.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin today's video I'm going to intentionally overpay for a scammy MacBook on eBay it's not it's not going to be fine so before we jump into the video I'd like to thank privacy comm for sponsoring with privacy you can generate virtual credit cards so you don't have to actually put your credit card information on the internet well actually be using it in today's video and if you head over to privacy comm slash Luke me Ani you can get a free $5 you guys know I love to talk about scamming mac booksellers it's sort of a crusade of mine to call these people out and expose them for the frauds that they are and in today's video we're going to be taking it a step further and actually buy one of these Mac books so without any further ado let's jump in to this listing that I found this right here is a 15 inch Apple MacBook Pro Intel 8 gigabyte one terabyte three-year warranty Mac OSX 2015 looks like we've got a unibody MacBook Pro as you can see very clearly in the pictures so this is somewhere between 2008 and 2012 so what are they asking for it 558 dollars so if we take a look here the first red flag that immediately catches your eye should be Intel now I know you're thinking why is that what's wrong with that of course it's got Intel it's not a PowerPC well but here's the thing if there is a Core i5 so like a 2010 15-inch MacBook Pro which will have a dual core i5 it's a garbage processor by today's standards but it's a core i5 nonetheless so they would plaster that all over the listing and they would be like turbo speeds of 500 gigahertz and stuff like that just to try and make you think that it's really good so the fact that they're just saying Intel that makes me think that this is older than a 2010 alright so the next red flag that should immediately stand out to you is Mac OSX 2015 this is the oldest trick in the book shady eBay sellers have been doing this for ages and basically what it does it just makes your listing of some old crap show up when you look for like a 2015 MacBook Pro fact let's put that to the test we'll open up a new tab over here and I'm just gonna look up MacBook Pro 2015 and there you have it just straight away all the way down the list that's not 2015 that's not a 2015 that's not either that's not so let's go down and read the description and see what exactly we're working with and try to figure out what the actual specs are of this machine so let's head on down here alright well the first thing that stands out to me is earlier model which has been upgraded to current year that is false advertising just straight up a lot of people have commented on the previous videos that I've made talking about these types of sellers and said well Luke you're you're right they're overcharging you but they're not technically doing anything wrong to that I say no here's the definition of false advertising false advertising is the use of false misleading or unproven information to advertise products to consumers by taking a 7 to 11 year old MacBook Pro and saying that it is an earlier model which has been upgraded to current year is false and misleading which makes this false advertising so at this point it is time to purchase this MacBook Pro and that brings me to our old friend privacy comm / luke Muni which you should head over to privacy comm is a really cool site it is completely free to use you don't have to pay for this at all they make their money through vendors not through consumers so it's totally free you can go ahead and sign up at privacy comm slash luke me on e and essentially what this does and I'll show you right over here is we're going to create a new card that I can use for this purchase so I don't have to use my actual credit card information so let's just call this scam Oh No there we go save that that's great spend limit this thing was five hundred dollars so let's set the spend limit per that's actually let's set the total so if anyone gets a hold of this card number you can't use it because once it hits 600 bucks which I'm about to do that card is useless so I just hit create card and there we go we've got a credit card with a $600 limit and I've got a credit card number so all I have to do is click on it and it's copied to the clipboard and now I can go ahead and purchase the worst use of 558 dollars that anyone has ever seen in their entire life okay well the order is placed I can't believe I just spent five hundred and fifty eight dollars and ninety cents on what I assume is a ten-year-old MacBook Pro with maybe $70 worth of parts added to it this was not a good idea for a video anyway okay so I'm gonna come back once I have this MacBook in hand and we're gonna see just how bad it is I've never been less excited to do an unboxing than I am now so this is what five hundred and fifty eight dollars and ninety cents gets ya let's see what it gets yeah geez hmm the old box within a box Oh No why did they not just ship it in this box come on what that legitimately took several minutes okay so now that we're actually inside of this thing let's see what we got okay so we got an external DVD drive which wait why would we have then this computer has a DVD drive okay that's a little weird okay so then we had our charger charger extension an external USB Drive why that sounds really cheap all right none of that was in the listing okay so I will say this the packaging is pretty decent I've had things that were packed a lot worse than this this is one of those sort of inflatable envelope type of things these are actually super good for packing PCs and laptops and stuff like that so it is good to see that we at least have some amount of professional miss here although I'm not I'm still confused about this bundle stuff I don't remember seeing anything about that in the listing so that's interesting alright so on the packing list here 15 inch Apple MacBook Pro Intel 8 gigabyte one terabyte three-year warranty below well yeah that's what I bought the actual MacBook Pro itself let's see let's get to this bubble wrap wait a minute this this doesn't make any sense this is a right now what this is a retina MacBook Pro it's a retina MacBook Pro the images looks like we've got a unibody MacBook Pro as you can see very clearly in the pictures and it's in really good condition too I mean what let's find out what your this is because all of a sudden this went from Al and classic scam to potentially being actually really good good value weirdly enough I don't know why they wouldn't advertise this as a retina that seems like a weird omission to me okay two gigahertz core i7 8 gigabytes of 1600 megahertz ddr3 this this is a late 2013 base model MacBook Pro and it's got a 1 terabyte solid-state drive what this video makes no sense 5:58 is actually not bad for one of these things let's see if there are they covering up any damage on this thing I mean it's not it's not exceptional condition I would say but it's not the head hundred and thirteen battery cycles that's not even bad that's like really good okay so let's crank this computer open and see what's going on here okay so here's our one terabyte SSD it looks like it's an Intel 660 P series SSD alright so it looks like they're going for about a hundred and five dollars on Amazon which isn't you know it's not like a 970 Pro or anything but it's still a one terabyte SSD this is still a hundred dollar part that had to get added here now as far as the rest of the internals here I don't see anything out of the ordinary sometimes you could conceivably see someone selling a a liquid damaged logic board that they have cobbled back to working order and then sold but this looks to be perfectly fine so that was definitely one of the most unusual unboxing experiences I've ever had I'm completely confused or at least I was at first so as you can tell it's a couple of days later and I've done some digging and actually I found some pretty interesting things so I was going on the listing trying to figure out what was going on here why did the computer I order look nothing like what the listing described and I went on to the sellers other items and I found a bunch of listings very similar to this one so you can see right here we have a 15-inch MacBook Pro Retina 16 gigabyte of RAM one terabyte solid-state drive high seven turbo warranty this actually starts to fall into line with what you would expect to see from a seller that's basically a large Apple reseller you can see in the title we're emphasizing Retina display we're emphasizing that we have solid-state storage we're emphasizing a core i7 processor and then of course in line with that advertising we have a rather high price of nine hundred and sixty-nine dollars now if we scroll on down to the description you'll notice that we have similar verbiage down here we have retina we have retina display eye seven turbo speeds you can even see eight virtual cores they're basically over selling the turbo boost and hyper-threading capabilities of this i7 and this appears to also have the same upgraded SSD it's just the 750 M higher tier late 2013 MacBook Pro now that's great this is a very decent machine however it's a little bit strange that this is almost twice as expensive as what I ordered and the only real differences are more RAM a little bit better processor and the dual graphics that definitely doesn't explain a $400 price gap and you'll also notice in the main picture here this is the same hard drive external hard drive came with my computer and in fact it says down here in the also includes section 500 gigabyte external backup drive which mine included so there's there's definitely some funny business going on here so here's my theory and to back up this theory we need to talk a little bit more about this seller and their history so Whitman technologies is the name of the seller that I bought this from but in the actual box itself I've had a business card from the representative I guess the salesperson who dealt with shipping my computer that was from well a key group now I've actually talked about them several times in the past when I've taken a look at these shady eBay sellers and they're a very very large group they run a ton of eBay accounts this one being one of them so it's a little bit weird that a group that large would mess up my order by including something that's way better so what I've done is I've devised a test there's gonna be a second part to this video because what I've done and granted you're gonna think I'm an idiot but I bought another one of these it's the exact same listing but what I did was I used a different email account and I'm having it mailed to a friend so my eBay account is not going to be on there that address is different and the name that it's shipping to is different so there's no way to connect these two purchases they should be completely independent now if this were actually the really good deal of a late-2013 retina MacBook Pro for five hundred dollars with a one terabyte SSD then that computer should be identical to the one that I bought because of course it's the same listing and then if it isn't so that's gonna do it for today's video thank you all so much for watching I hope you're as excited to find out what happens with this as I am as usual don't forget to Like comment and subscribe please consider following me on Twitter at Luke Vianney and definitely consider joining my subreddit if you have any questions or comments and with that I'll see you all in the next videoin today's video I'm going to intentionally overpay for a scammy MacBook on eBay it's not it's not going to be fine so before we jump into the video I'd like to thank privacy comm for sponsoring with privacy you can generate virtual credit cards so you don't have to actually put your credit card information on the internet well actually be using it in today's video and if you head over to privacy comm slash Luke me Ani you can get a free $5 you guys know I love to talk about scamming mac booksellers it's sort of a crusade of mine to call these people out and expose them for the frauds that they are and in today's video we're going to be taking it a step further and actually buy one of these Mac books so without any further ado let's jump in to this listing that I found this right here is a 15 inch Apple MacBook Pro Intel 8 gigabyte one terabyte three-year warranty Mac OSX 2015 looks like we've got a unibody MacBook Pro as you can see very clearly in the pictures so this is somewhere between 2008 and 2012 so what are they asking for it 558 dollars so if we take a look here the first red flag that immediately catches your eye should be Intel now I know you're thinking why is that what's wrong with that of course it's got Intel it's not a PowerPC well but here's the thing if there is a Core i5 so like a 2010 15-inch MacBook Pro which will have a dual core i5 it's a garbage processor by today's standards but it's a core i5 nonetheless so they would plaster that all over the listing and they would be like turbo speeds of 500 gigahertz and stuff like that just to try and make you think that it's really good so the fact that they're just saying Intel that makes me think that this is older than a 2010 alright so the next red flag that should immediately stand out to you is Mac OSX 2015 this is the oldest trick in the book shady eBay sellers have been doing this for ages and basically what it does it just makes your listing of some old crap show up when you look for like a 2015 MacBook Pro fact let's put that to the test we'll open up a new tab over here and I'm just gonna look up MacBook Pro 2015 and there you have it just straight away all the way down the list that's not 2015 that's not a 2015 that's not either that's not so let's go down and read the description and see what exactly we're working with and try to figure out what the actual specs are of this machine so let's head on down here alright well the first thing that stands out to me is earlier model which has been upgraded to current year that is false advertising just straight up a lot of people have commented on the previous videos that I've made talking about these types of sellers and said well Luke you're you're right they're overcharging you but they're not technically doing anything wrong to that I say no here's the definition of false advertising false advertising is the use of false misleading or unproven information to advertise products to consumers by taking a 7 to 11 year old MacBook Pro and saying that it is an earlier model which has been upgraded to current year is false and misleading which makes this false advertising so at this point it is time to purchase this MacBook Pro and that brings me to our old friend privacy comm / luke Muni which you should head over to privacy comm is a really cool site it is completely free to use you don't have to pay for this at all they make their money through vendors not through consumers so it's totally free you can go ahead and sign up at privacy comm slash luke me on e and essentially what this does and I'll show you right over here is we're going to create a new card that I can use for this purchase so I don't have to use my actual credit card information so let's just call this scam Oh No there we go save that that's great spend limit this thing was five hundred dollars so let's set the spend limit per that's actually let's set the total so if anyone gets a hold of this card number you can't use it because once it hits 600 bucks which I'm about to do that card is useless so I just hit create card and there we go we've got a credit card with a $600 limit and I've got a credit card number so all I have to do is click on it and it's copied to the clipboard and now I can go ahead and purchase the worst use of 558 dollars that anyone has ever seen in their entire life okay well the order is placed I can't believe I just spent five hundred and fifty eight dollars and ninety cents on what I assume is a ten-year-old MacBook Pro with maybe $70 worth of parts added to it this was not a good idea for a video anyway okay so I'm gonna come back once I have this MacBook in hand and we're gonna see just how bad it is I've never been less excited to do an unboxing than I am now so this is what five hundred and fifty eight dollars and ninety cents gets ya let's see what it gets yeah geez hmm the old box within a box Oh No why did they not just ship it in this box come on what that legitimately took several minutes okay so now that we're actually inside of this thing let's see what we got okay so we got an external DVD drive which wait why would we have then this computer has a DVD drive okay that's a little weird okay so then we had our charger charger extension an external USB Drive why that sounds really cheap all right none of that was in the listing okay so I will say this the packaging is pretty decent I've had things that were packed a lot worse than this this is one of those sort of inflatable envelope type of things these are actually super good for packing PCs and laptops and stuff like that so it is good to see that we at least have some amount of professional miss here although I'm not I'm still confused about this bundle stuff I don't remember seeing anything about that in the listing so that's interesting alright so on the packing list here 15 inch Apple MacBook Pro Intel 8 gigabyte one terabyte three-year warranty below well yeah that's what I bought the actual MacBook Pro itself let's see let's get to this bubble wrap wait a minute this this doesn't make any sense this is a right now what this is a retina MacBook Pro it's a retina MacBook Pro the images looks like we've got a unibody MacBook Pro as you can see very clearly in the pictures and it's in really good condition too I mean what let's find out what your this is because all of a sudden this went from Al and classic scam to potentially being actually really good good value weirdly enough I don't know why they wouldn't advertise this as a retina that seems like a weird omission to me okay two gigahertz core i7 8 gigabytes of 1600 megahertz ddr3 this this is a late 2013 base model MacBook Pro and it's got a 1 terabyte solid-state drive what this video makes no sense 5:58 is actually not bad for one of these things let's see if there are they covering up any damage on this thing I mean it's not it's not exceptional condition I would say but it's not the head hundred and thirteen battery cycles that's not even bad that's like really good okay so let's crank this computer open and see what's going on here okay so here's our one terabyte SSD it looks like it's an Intel 660 P series SSD alright so it looks like they're going for about a hundred and five dollars on Amazon which isn't you know it's not like a 970 Pro or anything but it's still a one terabyte SSD this is still a hundred dollar part that had to get added here now as far as the rest of the internals here I don't see anything out of the ordinary sometimes you could conceivably see someone selling a a liquid damaged logic board that they have cobbled back to working order and then sold but this looks to be perfectly fine so that was definitely one of the most unusual unboxing experiences I've ever had I'm completely confused or at least I was at first so as you can tell it's a couple of days later and I've done some digging and actually I found some pretty interesting things so I was going on the listing trying to figure out what was going on here why did the computer I order look nothing like what the listing described and I went on to the sellers other items and I found a bunch of listings very similar to this one so you can see right here we have a 15-inch MacBook Pro Retina 16 gigabyte of RAM one terabyte solid-state drive high seven turbo warranty this actually starts to fall into line with what you would expect to see from a seller that's basically a large Apple reseller you can see in the title we're emphasizing Retina display we're emphasizing that we have solid-state storage we're emphasizing a core i7 processor and then of course in line with that advertising we have a rather high price of nine hundred and sixty-nine dollars now if we scroll on down to the description you'll notice that we have similar verbiage down here we have retina we have retina display eye seven turbo speeds you can even see eight virtual cores they're basically over selling the turbo boost and hyper-threading capabilities of this i7 and this appears to also have the same upgraded SSD it's just the 750 M higher tier late 2013 MacBook Pro now that's great this is a very decent machine however it's a little bit strange that this is almost twice as expensive as what I ordered and the only real differences are more RAM a little bit better processor and the dual graphics that definitely doesn't explain a $400 price gap and you'll also notice in the main picture here this is the same hard drive external hard drive came with my computer and in fact it says down here in the also includes section 500 gigabyte external backup drive which mine included so there's there's definitely some funny business going on here so here's my theory and to back up this theory we need to talk a little bit more about this seller and their history so Whitman technologies is the name of the seller that I bought this from but in the actual box itself I've had a business card from the representative I guess the salesperson who dealt with shipping my computer that was from well a key group now I've actually talked about them several times in the past when I've taken a look at these shady eBay sellers and they're a very very large group they run a ton of eBay accounts this one being one of them so it's a little bit weird that a group that large would mess up my order by including something that's way better so what I've done is I've devised a test there's gonna be a second part to this video because what I've done and granted you're gonna think I'm an idiot but I bought another one of these it's the exact same listing but what I did was I used a different email account and I'm having it mailed to a friend so my eBay account is not going to be on there that address is different and the name that it's shipping to is different so there's no way to connect these two purchases they should be completely independent now if this were actually the really good deal of a late-2013 retina MacBook Pro for five hundred dollars with a one terabyte SSD then that computer should be identical to the one that I bought because of course it's the same listing and then if it isn't so that's gonna do it for today's video thank you all so much for watching I hope you're as excited to find out what happens with this as I am as usual don't forget to Like comment and subscribe please consider following me on Twitter at Luke Vianney and definitely consider joining my subreddit if you have any questions or comments and with that I'll see you all in the next video\n"