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Ask HN: On eBay, $50 Amazon gift cards are selling for $80-85.What am I missing?
Here is an item I just came across: a $50 Amazon gift card at a fixed price of $85.
That in itself is not the ridiculous part; some people can be tricked into overpaying for anything once in awhile. (Lincoln: "You can fool some of the people...")
But there have already been 4 sales via this listing at $80 or $85 each!
http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBidsLogin&item=282876678114&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2564
(You can click on the Item Link to the right to see the original listing.)
What am I missing? Really clumsy money laundering?
- MBCook 9y agoThey may be being used for money laundering.
- freelunch 9y agoMoney laundering is definitely a possibility since you can buy amazon gift cards directly from PayPal. I also think some items (not necessarily these gift cards) are being used as placeholder items for a product or service (drugs, etc). For instance I saw a very commonly available $2 bottle of salad dressing go for $20 the other day. I was intrigued and saw that a lot of items from the seller had sold for mulitples of their market value.
- gt_ 9y agoThis is interesting. I would expect eBay fees to crontradict the utility.
- paulcole 9y agoHow much does your money launderer charge?
- bbulkow 9y agoI saw a presentation at qcon last week by PayPal about contraband detection using image recognition, the example was a rose for 650 dollars. In the image was a handgun, in front of the roses. So that is a thing, and pp certainly has efforts to stop it, I assume eBay does too.
- huac 9y agoIt's not money laundering, who would launder $300?
- iggg 9y agoStolen credit cards, online bank accounts, PayPal accounts, etc are available for purchase. Not everyone is as rich as you where $300 is something to laugh at.
- himlion 9y agoI think you are using different definitions of laundering. turning drug money into legitimate money in a bank account is not really useful for these small amounts, but turning stolen goods into cash is.
- zimou13 9y agoI would like to know if it's possible to construct a queryEntity to retrieve data by joining tables. The case is that the main Entity that is being queried has IDs as values for fields and their description is on a different table, for which we have entities. https://showbox.onl/ https://showbox.onl/ https://vidmate.win/ https://vidmate.win/ https://mobdro.one/ https://mobdro.one/
- damm 9y agoSo yes you can sell your Amazon Gift cards; there's a market place for people selling used cards. https://wellkeptwallet.com/sell-amazon-gift-card-for-cash/ https://wellkeptwallet.com/sell-amazon-gift-card-for-cash/ Why else would you spent 500$ for a 300$ Gift card so you can get the card now to turn around and sell it for 250$ The profit!
- dmarlow 9y agoFor what you lose on each one, you can make up for in volume.
- jackone43210 9y agoWell I know for sure that a lot of prostitutes accept Amazon cards as payment for minor services and prefer those to be transferred electronically (as code).
- synaesthesisx 9y agoThere was a promotional code circulating for 20% off anything on eBay last week. Yes you read that correctly - 20% off anything, from any seller (got myself a new 4k monitor). Purely speculating here, but perhaps people were gaming the system by listing marked-up gift cards and buying their own listings. During this promotion eBay was paying out sellers the full amount - which leads me to the following: why was eBay intentionally taking these losses? Perhaps a last-ditch effort to temporarily boost sales on paper? It's not coincidence that they are replacing Paypal with Adyen - I think these are indications that there's some sort of merger or acquisition in the works...
- always_good 9y agoReminds me of when Bing launched and they had a 20% or so off many retailers that you clicked from their results. One was Ebay. I must've been 17 or 18 and used my summer savings to buy silver bars from Ebay 20% off and relist them. Not long after I noticed they severely restricted the types of discounted items.
- anxman 9y agoIt was 30% cash back for the first few days! I’m still using the suitcase that I bought.
- mmikeff 9y agoAnonymity? Buy gift card from random ebay person. Pay for something that you'd rather keep secret using gift card. Reduced chance of getting caught? e.g. https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/gift-card-payment https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/gift-card-paymen...
- WhiteOwlLion 9y agoSome buyers are using crypto via a third-party to buy these items on eBay. They use the Amazon GC afterwards to buy online services or buy a product to ship to their home country. eBay seller has to pay a hefty commission to eBay so that is part of the expense. Seller mails or sends eCode. Both can be risky because the buyer can refute that it was received. Post office even with signature confirmation is not always recorded correctly. UPS & FedEx Signature Require is expensive to use. You also have dishonest "buyers" that will submit a chargeback claim to the credit card for fraud (card does not work, etc). There's a myriad of expenses and risk to the seller.