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Ask HN: On eBay, $50 Amazon gift cards are selling for $80-85.What am I missing?

30 points by masonic ↗ HN
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?

19 comments

[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 51.9 ms ] thread
MBCook
They may be being used for money laundering.
freelunch
Money 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_
This is interesting. I would expect eBay fees to crontradict the utility.
paulcole
How much does your money launderer charge?
bbulkow
I 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
It's not money laundering, who would launder $300?
iggg
Stolen 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
I 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.
[dead] zimou13
I 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://vidmate.win/ https://mobdro.one/
dmarlow
For what you lose on each one, you can make up for in volume.
[dead] jackone43210
Well 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
There 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
Reminds 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
It was 30% cash back for the first few days! I’m still using the suitcase that I bought.
mmikeff
Anonymity?

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-paymen...

joezydeco
You can buy amazon gift cards at almost any retail store, with cash.

That's even less trackable than a payment to an eBay seller.

O_H_E
That does not apply in the non-US world (Maybe also EU, I don't know if they are being sold there)
WhiteOwlLion
Some 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.