Gondorian

Another sold today to the same address to a third buyer. I've been told right thing to do by eBay customer service is to hit 'Cancel the Order' and put 'Something wrong with address' as the reason and hit 'Refund'. Then also report the buyer and add to blocked buyers list. Does not stop hacker using another account and trying to get from me though. p.s. Last night I had an email with no content other than 'Lego ???' from the email from the buyer who bought 2 sets. So the hacker has the email account as well as eBay account.

Hey all! I've not sold anything for about 6 months and listed a bunch of things on eBay last night. Within 12 hours, I have sold 3 £100+ items to two buyers all at the same address in Leicester. The first has already been flagged as unauthorised payment which is what alerted me to the other two purchases from the second account (both of these bought within minutes of each other). Just had long chat to eBay about this issue and mentioned what has been discussed on this thread too. I asked if they would send police round to this address or at least put some fraud detection on that flags things to an address that has already been marked unauthorised payment as potentially dodgy. I was told they are going to investigate. I was passed onto Selling team after I said I am not even going to bother relisting the items because hacked eBay account fraud is so rife. I suggested they add an option for us to block buyers that don't use two-factor authentication. I still have 21 items on there. I wonder how many more will sell today with that same Leicester address. The last time I was scammed like this (last year), it was to Leicester as well. I think there must be a fraud ring there. I don't think the fraudster is actually at that address, but maybe the courier is in on the scam.

I guess 300 sets in 3 years is not considered enough to be a business seller. I also go long periods with nothing on there and it's never in multiples when they are on there. Maybe that's the kind of thing they look for, I don't know.

Thanks for the replies and encouragement. Mhd747 has shared a lot of wisdom above. And brickvoyeur's idea of only playing with house money is a good one and the returns from that initial $25 are astounding, but don't overlook the time that goes into it! That's a precious resource too. Speaking of which ... I've been thinking more about this and am sure I could not have stopped myself from spending so much years ago, but I reckon I'm in a better place now with a little more self-control and not feeling so down that I need a thrill of bargain hunting and imagined profits as an addiction. It also helps to know how much work is involved in realising the profits. It kind of takes the shine off that bit, which then makes the bargains look less good. I'm also getting a bit disillusioned with Lego due to having no space for finished sets to go (whether built by instructions or our own creations) and no time to do anything with them. We have too many opened sets and any Lego time seems to be spent tidying up! I found it really hard to sell my only Town Hall, clinging onto the dream of having a row of modulars one day, but I decided to let it go because I knew deep down I would never open it and never find the space to put it. I've since sold both my Fire Brigades as well and not bought any of the newest modulars. So there's another aspect of the buying addiction shattered! Yay! So since there's no longer the same kind of addictive pull and I can think more clearly, I can now remember and try to stick to a golden rule I set for myself about 10 years ago which I guess I forgot: never do anything purely for money. The daft thing is that I had some spare money 4 years ago and I bought Lego mostly to try to make more money off it (with minor expectation to keep some of the Lego for myself). I didn't even need the money, yet I still did something just for money! Obviously, I have got other benefits from doing all the selling, as I outlined in my previous post yesterday, but I don't think doing any more buying to make money from it can be justified to myself. I have a strong belief that I should put time into things that deliver value first and foremost, with money flowing from that (hopefully). If I get really good at Lego investing, then what value have I given the world other than helping people find retired sets in very good condition sealed in box? When I consider each bought set to take at least one hour in the future to liquidate (more like three hours when you factor in buying/storing/logging/listing/packing/posting) then each purchase is a commitment to throw away that time in the future. Time I can't afford to throw away when there's value to be delivered in this world! I hope this post was useful or I wasted time trying to deliver value for you guys! Don't get me wrong, I think Lego investing can be a good source of extra income if you have the time available to put into it, but it needs to be down to your individual philosophy as to whether you want to give up that time. I don't want to any more, so buying any more sets is just going to make things worse in terms of time for me.

I don't mind answering. These are good things to be thinking about for me anyway. 1. I'd say the most important thing is to know where your sets are and what condition they are in. I've spent a while reorganising and double-accounting all my stock and checking the condition over the last few months. If I list as very good condition then it needs to be that way and I need to be able to find it at short notice to have it packed and sent the next day. I don't often put photos on unless people ask or there is some visible issue, but I'm trying more to have sets that are for sale in easy reach to get more photos if there's a lull in selling. I'd say about 90% of my sets have sold with stock photos, just listed as very good condition (which they are) and I've never had complaints about the condition. 2. The biggest challenge has been to stick to my one working day dispatch time. If I know I'm going away somewhere, but have listed sets due to an eBay promo (e.g. a £1 max final-value fee), I bump up the prices to unreasonable levels and dispatch time to try to discourage people from buying, since you can't stop a listing temporarily and then restart with the promo. Only one person has ever bought when I've done this, and thankfully it was before I went away and I got extra money for the set! Another big challenge is to not worry about unreasonable complaints or things going missing. 3. I've not noticed any changes in the reselling market over the past two years really. There's certainly more knock-off mini figures which is likely pulling down the value of Superhero sets (I really thought these were winners when I stocked up but I have barely sold any in two years, mostly due to them not hitting heights that make it worth my time to sell them), but I have so many other themes that it's not impacted me. I think there probably are more resellers now and there was one month where the lowest price for most sets was much lower than before due to one seller seemingly trying to clear a lot in a short while, so I just took a break that month and I guess he cleared all his stock. 4. Knowing what I know today, I would have kept shares in Apple and Facebook and Amazon instead of buying Lego. But hindsight is a wonderful thing. I feared a stockmarket crash that should have happened but never did and I had spare money and liked Lego and got a thrill from chasing Lego bargains and spending money. I was not enjoying my job which took up most of my time and needed some addiction to keep the dopamine up and the Lego investing was it for a while. There are certainly worse things to get a thrill from and the returns from this have been great (as opposed to blowing money that you can't get back). 5. My strategy from here will depend on whether I end up with an office job again. While I work from home, I can keep going like this. I wait for eBay to offer me a promo and then I list about 40-70 sets (any unsold from last time and an extra copy of any I sold recently). If I go back to work away from home, I will have to put slower dispatch times and offload sets more slowly, but then I won't really need the money so desperately because I will only do that to get back to my decent salary I had three years ago. Side-note: It's worth trying being self-employed or having no income at all for a while, living off savings (or Lego reselling) for a while. Even if you have a wife and three kids! Once you've done that, the fear of losing your job security and income is not as big in future. I would have quit my office job much sooner if I had known I would not keel over and die without it. Almost all the biggest "success" stories I hear seem to come from people who hit rock bottom or just started with almost nothing. The effort to get back to parity (or just survive) drives you forward and then you don't lose that momentum when you hit "normal" - you keep going up. If you've only ever been at normal, then you can get stuck and don't have the momentum. Two of my biggest idols are Tony Robbins and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson - both started with so little, but they had good attitudes and determination and commitment. I think I've generally had a good attitude but have never been particularly self-disciplined to be able to stick to specific goals/projects. This Lego selling has helped a lot with that kind of thing, as I'm more of an Ideas Man who starts lots of projects and never takes them anywhere.

Hmm. Looks like the one-way transition to a new forum system for BrickPicker majorly truncated my post and likely many more good ones by others EDIT: Seems like it did it when it hit the pound sign (£). Other old posts in the thread are truncated at that point too.

Apologies for bumping my old post, but I figured I'd do a little update. I've now sold just over 300 sets, at average of 100% ROI. Assuming I've held most for about 3 years, then that's something like 30% interest per year. But then there's the effort to list and pack and post that eats into that, but I've slowly got better and better at doing it all so I wouldn't call it work. It's become like a ritual and I'll have either football or WWE on in the background that I would have likely watched anyway. I've also taken to having the packages picked up from my house pretty much all the time which costs a bit more but saves time and mileage. Overall, I guess it would still have been smarter to dump all the money I spent on Lego in the bank because I could take it all out now (not that I could have stopped myself spending, as I outlined in the original post), but there's a few good points to this mess I got into. 1) For each £500 that I liquidate, I'm getting £1000 in my bank account on average. Sure, the stock market has gone up these past years and I could have got similar return on the right stocks, but it's a lot better than just taking £500 out the bank. I've not had anything big to spend on (no way to get a mortgage right now as a self-employed contractor) so taking out in these lumps for profit ain't bad. 2) Being able to keep up such a high standard of delivery is something to feel proud of and boost my own confidence in myself, especially in terms of tackling something overwhelming. I have trouble looking far into the future and sometimes get overwhelmed by sheer quantity at times, and likely never thought I could get 300 sold. I still have about 600 left, but I know it's possible and the average size and value of each set remaining is coming down which means I will start farming out some sales to my wife to do on a separate eBay account. I've kept my stock organised and maintained good records, which is also something that does not come naturally to me. In terms of the one-way transition, I have still been buying Lego sets for investment, but not many. It's hard to resist buying into what I believe will be a clear winner, even though I know to win on that set will take the work of organising/storing/listing/packing/posting. I don't think I've bought in the last two months though.

I hope you didn't manage to sell it. It would go easily on eBay for £290 delivered.

Sold my first Tower of Orthanc the other day for only 60% profit (£100 profit after fees and postage). There are quite a lot of sellers now around this price, so I can't see it going up much in the next 6 months, but maybe it will go up more by Christmas. I'd still say it was worth my time and money and space to have bought and stored and eventually sold it, but obviously buying five DeLoreans would have been smarter! My other LOTR sets have been selling steadily over the past year at more than 100% profit, so probably more of those would have also been an idea but I think the first wave was retired when ToO came out.

I wish I had an Audi!

Welcome! I'm in Cambridgeshire too. If you ever want to trade anything in person, that would be more efficient than eBay selling! Please let me know if there's anything in particular you are after.

Well, they could link them if they are sneaky and naughty, but they really shouldn't be doing that. I get my own eBay items advertised back to me on Facebook, by the way.

Well, that's surely different because I would hope that Google Adsense can't link your eBay account and your BP account just from what is collected in the browser to know not to advertise back to you.

Cool, we just hit 4000 replies here. I'd like to mark the occasion by talking about the king of the fruitcakes itself: eBay. Sometimes I get email alerts about sets I have viewed that I am selling myself. It's to my eBay account email address about a set being sold by that same account. How dumb are they? This happens either when I have dropped the price or if it has a few watchers and not much time left.

As I posted on another thread, this has only happened to me once so far (and hopefully never again). It was a Star Wars set. The 7965 Millennium Falcon. There were three very strange things about it, which did not cause alarm bells at the time but certainly would in future. 1) It sold within minutes of me listing it, at about 30 seconds past midnight. 2) It was by no means the cheapest one on there. 3) The address had two postcodes, but then the eBay buyer sent me a message in bad English to confirm which one. "oh my good excuse me, i make a mistake on zip, ship it please on correct zip..." If you've followed this on the Fruitcakes thread, you'll know that eventually a chargeback came through about 24 days after the sale (initiated via credit card company), which PayPal resolved against me after 14 days of holding my money despite me sending proof of delivery to the supplied address, but then I phoned today to complain and they fixed it and I have kept the money as though it was a normal transaction sent to the right place as opposed to a hacked eBay account sent to some fraudster in Leicester. Not sure if this is the right place to raise this, but how do people handle cash on collection? I advise the person to not hit buy until we have met up and actually done the swap of cash for item. When they hit Buy, I can then mark as payment sent and dispatched and it's all sorted. I have done this for the 4 transactions done in person so far. If they hit Buy before we meet, then they can back out and I have lost any Final Value Fee offer I had. (This happened once.)