Ebay seller does not want to sell his items ........

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dellzeqq

pre-talced and mighty
Location
SW2
You may not Dell....
I don't buy stuff from E-bay, or Gumtree, and would never ever consider buying a bike or bits of a bike or anything that might have been stolen. I know fine well when I looked at the ads for bikes on Gumtree that half of them had been stolen
 

swee'pea99

Squire
You may not Dell....
No, Archie, I think you've misunderstood Dell's response. He wasn't saying that he doesn't care - Heaven forbid! No, he was saying people who buy off ebay they let themselves of the hook by not being moral enough to give a damn.

Which is of course bollocks.

The answer to your query, if you're actually interested, is that of course you can never be absolutely totally 100% sure, any more than you can be if you buy things second hand from an ad in your local paper, or even off a market stall. (Ever done that?) What you can do is (a) take heart in the fact that the vast majority of sellers are just regular people, like you and me, and the vast majority of stuff is absolutely kosher and exactly what it appears to be: people selling off stuff they don't need for whatever reason, to make a few quid, and (b) if you have any suspicions at all (and bikes is probably one area where you should err on the side of caution - bikes being eminently nickable, and regularly nicked) check out the seller's feedback, and exchange a few emails to get the cut of their jib. You can generally tell if there's anything whiffy, and then you back off and 'wait for the next one to come along'. (As against, say, telling yourself 'I don't care if it's nicked'. Which is, no doubt, an approach used by some ebay/car-boot buyers, some of whom, in line with the population as a whole, will be scumbags. But an approach that, I'd suggest, is very rare, and certainly no grounds for sneering at ordinary people using marketplaces that are no more inherently dodgy than any other where second hand goods are bought and sold, to the mutual benefit of decent sellers and decent buyers.)

If you don't want to use ebay or car boot sales, fine. That's your choice.

Do correct me if I've read you wrong, Dellzeqq.
 

Archie_tect

De Skieven Architek... aka Penfold + Horace
Location
Northumberland
That's a relief! Pleased that's sorted out... Good example of what you say isn't interpreted as you mean...wasn't sneering SP]
 

dellzeqq

pre-talced and mighty
Location
SW2
Do correct me if I've read you wrong, Dellzeqq.
you've understood me perfectly.

Some people here will know the police officer who is charged with catching bike thieves in London. Listening to him is a sobering experience. There will always be thieves, but the the thing that makes bike-thieving so well-rewarded is that there is a never ending queue of people, very many of whom are in decent jobs, who will arrange to meet a bike seller at a tube station with nothing more than a mobile number and several hundred pounds in cash.

I imagine that this goes for any other type of expensive portable item where the seller is, effectively, anonymous.

My view is this - unless you can assure yourself that the thing you want to buy has not been nicked, then you shouldn't touch it. That might mean missing out on a bargain, but, hey, get over it.
 

Banjo

Fuelled with Jelly Babies
Location
South Wales
See above. Following his response I have decided not to bid. What do you think of his response as Seller?
I think possibly his salesmanship skills could do with a little refining.On the other hand calling someone mad in a question about an ebay item is a little unusual?
 

alecstilleyedye

nothing in moderation
Moderator
in fairness, there are people out there who are rich enough to buy an expensive camera/bike on a whim, know nothing about it other than it takes pictures/gets them about and then get bored with complicated cameras/bikes with dropped handlebars and flog them on. of course they could look up the model and copy and paste the description on the manufacturer's site, but probably can't be arsed.

if he's got the receipt, that should be ok.
 
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