I'm aware, I already did that. And yes, I got my money back. That seems completely beside your "it's near-impossible to scam people since 2008" point though? Unless your position is "it's only a scam if it succeeds"?
There's a legitimate market for faulty electronics, which I personally participate as both a buyer and a seller.
People buying something without realising it's faulty is an expensive problem for me, as it inevitably means a return which is both time consuming and leaves me on the hook for postage both ways (return postage usually being a more expensive method).
If they're trying to scam with it, I doubt they'd get very far as it's extremely expensive and ruins your metrics.
It's great that you deal with faulty devices honestly. I sell my own share of broken devices too. The difference between us and these sellers is we're honest and upfront about faults, instead of trying to pass off broken devices as "tested and working". The fact that they instantly issue a refund without even a single peep suggests to me they know fully well what they're doing and that it's profitable for them. Regardless of whether they do this intentionally or just out of reckless disregard, whatever metrics are supposed to be getting ruined by this evidently aren't getting ruined enough; my experience shows the problem is clearly there.
To be honest wih you, I've been in the other seller's exact situation before. Just the other day, we sold a PS2 which had been serviced, tested and confirmed working.
The buyer received it, the disc tray would even eject at all. They opened a return request, sent it back and it turns out that the employee who serviced it hasn't properly reinstalled a small clip that holds part of the disc drive in place, which led to it collapsing internally during shipping.
Other times, we've had requests which were not our fault but simply not worth fighting. Why spend time, energy and money trying to convince someone to be a bit more patient waiting for their $5 item when you can just refund and ban them from future purchases?
Multiple times, I've been accused of all kinds of nasty things even when there's no fault or issue at all (and in 0% of cases, this has helped the buyer).
I think the average punter just seriously underestimates the difficulty of thoroughly testing second-hand goods.
Well your experience is not relevant to mine. My device didn't need a "thorough" test, literally turning the device on and testing its most fundamental functionality would've told them it's broken. No, mine did not have mechanical or sensitive parts like this that could've broken along the way, or anything like that. These were very clearly something they never tested. And no, they weren't $5, they were quite a bit more. And these were very clearly priced just enough below the actual working ones to entice you into buying them.
Of course it doesn't seem like you want to to believe me no matter what, which is fine. I'm not sure what the point of arguing to discredit my experience is. It just drains our energy to no end. I know what I see, and you know what you see, and that's basically all it is.
