What Would You Do
A couple weeks ago, I bought some 1-oz Silver Buffalo coins on ebay. They were for a relatively good price, and I researched the seller as much as possible to verify that they looked reputable, and everything seemed in order. A day or two after I had bought them, I got an email from eBay stating that the auction had been canceled and it no longer showed up anywhere in my eBay account. That was a little worrying to me, so I immediately started a PayPal dispute in hopes that if it had been a scam, that my money could still be refunded.
The seller had already sent me an email stating why the auction had been canceled (evidently some poor wording on their payment terms that eBay didn’t like). I was still uncomfortable, so I replied and asked that the transaction be refunded. Shortly afterward, the seller sent the refund via PayPal, so everything worked out fine.
At this point, it was evident that the seller was legitimate (no scammer would have ever refunded my money), They still had a good deal on the coins, so I went directly to their website and re-ordered the same thing. It mentioned that delivery could take a couple of weeks, which is fairly normal, so I expected them soon.
This weekend I received the package via FedEx (earlier than I expected) and found that it actually contained more than I expected. Some mix-up had occurred and even though they had refunded my initial eBay transaction, the coins still got shipped.
So I now had some extra coins valued at about $300. I was pretty tempted to just keep the coins and figure that I was fortunate – something that I think many people would probably do. Maybe the seller would go through their books and eventually figure out the problem. If they asked me directly about it, then I wouldn’t lie, but maybe they wouldn’t ever discover it.
Despite that temptation, I emailed them this morning and explained that they had shipped me extra. I offered to pay for them at the same price that I had paid for the others. Their reply thanked me for my honesty, saying that it was ‘refreshing’, and that I could pay them for the coins as I suggested, and without shipping. I just finished paying for them and can’t describe how good that it feels to be honest.
