eBay buyer/seller to avoid - Panasonic AG-1980P rip off!
 

im throwing this out there so this guy doesn't try pulling this scam any forum members.

i sold him a broken ag-1980- it was listed as "for part not working" and had HUGE letters in the auction description stating it was broken.
it powered up but had transport issues and would not take a tape.

he paid a paltry $50 for it.
after he has it for almost 2 weeks - he sends me scathing emails, files an ebay case and sent me pics of the video head disassembled - (he said the video head was broken off and rattling around in the unit).
anyone who has looked inside an AG-1980 knows there is no way the head can just break off even if the delivery driver threw it off the truck that would not happen.
it was packed very well as all my items are.
he said it was poorly packed and that cause the broken head and i should have only charged him $10 for shipping
hopefully he ebay case goes nowhere as i listed it as broken

truth of the matter is it either wasn't the easy fix and flip he was hoping for(must not be a very good tech) or he wanted it for free.
still it had a good power supply and other parts and was worth $50

this guy has at least 4 different ebay ID's and buys/sells the kind of hardware that we on the forum might use.
he is in Houston Texas and goes by av-collection, sony-av collector, trans-auction and 123wonbid

Its amazing how greedy these flippers have gotten. There is a degree of risk in the business that some don't take into account. If anything the buyer should have treated the machine as a source of parts for future restorations/repairs. Was this the machine with the bad y/c board? If so, makes you wonder why he took the head apart!

As I always tell people, be very careful about buying (and selling) on eBay, because there's a lot of liars on there.

I had to file on eBay twice this week. One was just yesterday.

The first was an ATI card that didn't work. Luckily, that seller just issued a refund, which included shipping. I now have a DOA card that I'm tossing. It may have been pulled from a working system, but it doesn't work now. Probably a case of a person storing it in a junk drawer without a static bag for an extended period.

The second one, yesterday, was a toy gift for somebody. (It was a 1982 Smurfs car for guess who!) The auction said "card has some issues, mainly corner curls and a couple of creases ... stain on the back of the card. This would make a great starter piece for a collection or a great toy to open and actually play with." But what he forgot to mention is that it smelled like an old ashtray. That thing had to be in a smoker house for a decade, because the stink leeched through the sealed bubble, through the cardboard, and even the toy stunk. That's NOT as described. He failed to mention "smells like ass" on the auction page. I'd have never bought it. The whole package stunk like smoker, including the packing material, and even the USPS box itself! Those smokers screw up so many toys, electronics, etc, by breathing their toxins on it.

So it's not just buyers, but sellers too. People suck sometimes.

that one i sold to believe it or not Southern Advantage -(never heard a complaint on that one)

this one looked like perhaps someone had forced a stuck tape in or out
it would accept a tape at all.

i still have one more - i blocked all 4 of his user-ID's from bidding on my stuff

this guys sell alot of 1980's and 5710's so one would think he could use the parts
he has many overpriced sony decks and JVC mini-dv SVHS combo decks listed

smokey stuff really sucks - i got a HR-S9800 once that was ruined by a smoker.

problem with those people is it smells normal to them - everything in their house/car smell like cigarette so they are desensitized to the smell.

It must be the weather cause I also have had issues on "the bay" (as we call it in our house)

Lady buys an item from me. She thought it was something else which it wasn't. So much for reading lol. Then sends me 13 ebay messages in less then 4 hours asking me how I'm going to fix this and then files a complaint with ebay over the auction. what a nutcase

Also volksjager, I've found with similar issues like this one that when I call paypal and or ebay and tell them what is going on. They seem to side with me faster then waiting the normal amount of time. Never sold a vcr but sold a sealed game and this person claimed it wasn't "sealed to his liking" so I told him I'd give him $10 off the total price as it wasn't really my problem nor my fault but what the hey Im fair. so we agree...3 days later he opened a ebay dispute saying the item wasn't as described blah blah blah. failing to mention I refunded him, so a quick call to paypal straighten that out real quick :D

If the buyer disassembled the VCR that's an automatic win for you in the dispute. Any attempt to tamper with the goods will void any buyer protection.

Once I sent a scanner accessory to the official vendor service center to get proof that it didn't work. My mistake. The buyer protection was void instantly when I provided PayPal with the (manufacturer official!) documents. I would've probably won the dispute if I'd done nothing.

he definitely disassembled it-
this morning he escalated the dispute to ebay customer service - we will have to see where this goes

i cant believe some who does this as a business is willing to burn a bridge over a $50 parts deck that was listed as "for parts not working"

ebay decided in my favor :) - they even removed the negative feedback he left me for that transaction.

however im stuck with a negative he left me as a retaliation on a sony hi-8 deck he bought over a month ago.

Good to hear it was resolved, but annoying that you even had to deal with it. Part of the advantage of listing a unit as "non-working/parts or repair only" is that it should release you of any liability or guarantees. I miss the old ebay of 10 years ago when they were just a provider of basic auction services (with a cheap listing fee) and not an end-to-end marketplace solutions provider.

I bought something for $10 this week, and it was taped excessively. I had to try not to damaged the item because the person went nuts with a roll of clear tape. That's actually worse than not trying to secure it!

i have had sellers actually put tape directly on the front of decks.
what a PITA to clean off.

I am happy I found this post. I was thinking to buy from one of these. All of these accounts are still active and have vcrs for sale now.

There is another seller on ebay named youwillbesatisfied. Also located in Houston and selling AG-1980. What are the odds that it is someone completely different?

If you want a 1980 get one from Tgrant photo,

Rule of eBay: If it looks fishy, it probably is. :wink2:

Thanks for the replies.

I also had an encounter with this guy. I asked him a couple of questions about one of the Panasonic AG-1980 that he had for sale on eBay. When I wanted more clarification from his first set of answers, I sent him a second email. Not only did he refuse to answer my question, I sent me back a sarcastic answer. When I called him out on his answer, he continued to send back insulting and degrading answers. Stay away from this guy!!!

seems he has a new user id now too - vcrseller ( and this one doesnt list city)
i bought 2 decks listed by him(didnt know it was danny/son tran until i checked out)
only to have the transaction canceled a half hour later stating he listed them at the wrong price.
i wish ebay would boot this guy - there is no reason to have 5 different user-ids unless your trying to hide something.

I've been watching eBay auctions for AG-1980's and I've noticed something peculiar.

Pretty much on every auction style listing, there's two bidders who always bid, but virtually never win. Since IDs are masked, they only show as o***e and h***o. Makes me wonder if they are just two people who try to get a deal by bidding on everything, or if they just inflate the prices on purpose.

volksjager I'm curious to know why you dealt with this guy a second time if he had already left you one negative feedback. Was it before you realised he was using multiple IDs?

Thanks for sharing this by the way. More and more Ebay is becoming a treacherous place. Like NJRoadfan I too miss the Ebay of ten years ago.

I recently had an experience where a seller sold me a fraudulent copy of the original Woman in Black DVD. They seemed to get offended when I pointed it out and asked for a refund. I opened a case with Ebay and the seller still gave me a bit of a runaround before finally reversing the transaction. They then sent me one last email as a sort of Parthian shot acting like they had done me a favour and taking umbrage at my impudence for daring to make such a request.

i didnt know it was him the 2nd time - he has so many different user id's
not until after and i saw the name/address on the paypal did i realize it was yet another of his many usernames.

I just stumbled onto this thread. I purchased an AG-1980 from 123wonbid on eBay a few days back. It hasn't even arrived yet. Supposed to be tested and great shape. Is there any chance the unit is ok or should I not even accept it?

the guy is crooked and i would have doubt about his skill at repairing them
they may work upon arival, but are they truly 100% and how long will it last?
i would refuse the package and get a refund
buy a AG-1980 from Tgrant photo - they know what they are are doing

I doubt it will arrive as described. Get ready to file a Paypal dispute. The guy is an ass from what I've been hearing for the past 2 years.

I tend to wonder if he's a member of this site.

It's called shill bidding, ebay takes that seriously, just report his ass they will investigate all the bidders and they will shut him down.

unfortunately ebay does almost nothing about shill bidding,
i see and report it all the time and have yet to see an item removed for it.
it is absolutely rampant and quite obvious on some items.
they make more money if the item sell for a higher price so they pretty much just ignore it.
shopgoodwill is even worse, the employees are the ones bidding up everything there.
(goodwill is a sham charity too boot)

That same user is still at it... I was messaging back and forth with 123wonbid for an AG-1980 and something seemed off. Glad I checked the forum before making my purchase.

Also, he has another account on eBay that is not listed here: audio-video-hobby

Steer clear of that eBay user account as well.

Guess who just bought a 1980 off "audio-video-hobby" aka 123wonbid on ebay ;(

Something I'm not grasping here... "123WonBid" has 2,747 transactions, 100% positive. Zero negative in the last year. "audio-video-hobby" has 2,910 transactions, 100% positive.
If these guy(s) are so terrible, where's the negative ratings? Are they winning all their disputes?

I just got a Panasonic 1980 too from "audio-video-hobby". I even sent those both the same question: "what relationship do you have with the ebay seller "123WonBid/audio-video-hobby" out of Texas? :) It's 2 different sellers, but the price/shipping/item descriptions are the exact same?"

I did not receive an answer to that part of the question, just telling me if a VCR included a remote or not.

Let's stay in close contact and see how this goes. Because there's 2 of us, our chances greatly increase.
PM me please.

-- merged --

Sorry for all the posts, its a stream-of-conciousness. I'm so upset. :(

I just noticed there's zero pictures of the units themselves, or a TV screen, or the menus..

I feel stupid.

Still not quite sure what the scam is, unless the dude resells tons of units, gets lucky w/ most of them, but also has a few bad apples, doesn't repair them, and doesn't care??

I have a sinking feeling and how can I goto bed now? I'm pretty depressed ;(

Just checked the auction...I wonder objectively what this means: "Seller refurbished: Replaced all bad and bad-designed capacitors with IMPROVED and HIGH QUALITY CAPS. Check, Test, Clean and Lube Whole Mechanism, ..." <- the 2nd part of this sentence is written like a work-order, it doesn't say what he/they actually did, does it? The tense isn't even in past-tense.

Also, you guys really push tgrant, that's fine. They're asking $200+ more than the highest-priced 1980 units on Ebay (except for some nut asking $700). I figured w/ 100% positive, 2,000+ transactions, this guy was just reselling units he repaired.

The reason that we highly suggest TGrant is because there's a lot of time and parts that have to go into a AG-1980P refurb these days. His prices are higher than average, yes. It's the difference between somebody that 100% stands behind his product, and somebody that does not.

The buy/sell landscape has changed a lot in the past 5 years. It's vastly different from just 10 or 15 years ago. There really are more bad than good units these days. Inflation is also terrible. Working units used used to be about $250-325, and not working units were $100 (depending on problem). Finding working units was also easier to do.

A lot of eBay sellers are shysters. But that's always been the case. Recently I've watching re-watching The Big Bang Theory, from the pilot. In an earlier episode, Penny throws an iPod out the window, at her cheating boyfriend outside. You hear it completely smash on the pavement. Raj walks in a few minutes later, with a broken iPod. "Look what I found! A free iPod!" Howard asks what he's going to do this it, as it's completely broken. He says "What else? List it on eBay as slightly used!" That, in a nutshell, has been eBay in the 2000s. Buyer beware.

I'd suggest a lot of AG-1980 buyers are clueless as to what they're getting. Many don't know what they don't know. It takes a site like this to train them on the facts, including what to look for. Or worse, at least a confirmation of an error being present on the deck.

It's shame that shitheads like that give all Texas sellers a bad name.

@volksjager: Agreed about Goodwill. Any "non-profit" that pays its CEO almost a million dollars in salary is NOT a charity. It has a hugely lopsided ratio of actual charitable funds used to internal funds used. Worse yet, they pay employees less than minimum wage, which take advantage of the disabled. Their eBay auctions are really like Raj (in the above example) too!

We probably have eBay issues about 5% of the time, at minimum, as buyers. Some years have been higher, at almost 10% of bad/problem transactions. The main reasons as (1) dishonest sellers, (2) cheap Chinese knockoffs that are not even close to the original.

lplp & bilbofett: How did you guys make out on your AG-1980 purchases? It would be good to know what this seller is peddling for future reference.

Just came across this thread.

I bought and received a Panasonic AG-1980 from "123wonbid" just a few weeks ago. It was in good shape and in very good working order. If I had read this thread beforehand, I would not have purchased it. Maybe I got lucky?

Mine seems to be ok.

He may have over-lubed it a bit, I opened it up and wiped some areas (using denatured 70% alcohol and a chamois) where there was little dark black oil spot accumulations. My opinion is, that oil *probably* would've gotten onto the actual tapes themselves had I not wiped it out. There was also white "oil" deep on the insides of the left and right, but not anywhere a tape would touch, so I left it. After that, I played a few tapes I wouldn't miss, and opened it back up to check and the oil's gone now.

-Picture seems ok?
-Sound seems alright.
-All playback/rewind/fast forward functions seem to work.
-Jog/shuttle works, along with search sound.
-Recording works. I didn't have an SVHS videotape so I just recorded it in standard.
-Tracking works,
-the TBC seems to work.
-I can toggle between Color and B&W.
-Sharpness slider works.
-Mono button works.
-Pass-through works; I fed it an S-VHS signal to use for calibration (DVE Basics bluray)
-I've played a few SP commercial movies all the way through now, for capturing purposes. No issues other than the tapes had their own problems. I've probably used it 9+ hours so far.
-I do not have any tapes in SLP/EP, or S-VHS playback to test.
-I did not test the programming guide, VCR+, or channel tuner :)

The VCR *could* be clipping blacks, but I think that has more to do with the capture card. Sanlyn is helping me look at that aspect now.

Question: Are there any onscreen functions? I don't see any. The Panasonic remote that came with it does not have any menu buttons for that (the remote is for another Panasonic model, but works with this VCR, I knew that before bidding in the auction).

Question: Wheres this "bad-ass" Noise Reduction I keep hearing about? Is it enabled internally when you flip the TBC switch on? Because the picture quality isn't *THAT* amazing. I guess I'd need to see how horrible it could look in a different VCR?

Tgrant photo says its their preferred and "best" VCR:
http://www.tgrantphoto.com/sales/ind...g-1970-sr-v10u
"Each VCR had it's TBC turned on, and we adjusted settings on each VCR to give the most pleasing, and sharpest, playback image from that same VHS tape." What settings adjustments on the 1980? There aren't any, besides a sharpness slider.
-And they ran everything through a TBC, and a ProAmp, and an Enhancer after that. ...Why??

pumapuma and others, from what I can tell so far, this seems to be a reliable unit. I noticed the seller would not pick up the phone when I called him, and I also noticed he left no feedback for our transaction, nor has requested any from me.
My *guess* is he does minimal tinkering on these, if at all, and some are great buys, and some are not. He may have burned some people in the past with bad units, but not on any of the transaction feedbacks I read. The using multiple ebay handles is very shady, I agree on that.

This unit had a 14-day return policy on it (I'm past that), and I added a Squaretrade 2 year warranty onto it after I received it.

Thank you for posting about these sellers. I know this is an old thread, and I joined only so that I may share my experience with the seller sony-av-collector . I have an AG-1980 listed for sale on eBay right now for $288, and I used the "Send offers" feature to send a lower price offer of $249 to the handful of people who had the listing in their watched list. sony-av-collector sent me back an offer of $111, which because of my settings, it was automatically declined and I hadn't even noticed it until I received a message from them saying:

Hi,
I received an message "You have received an offer of US $120.00 from the seller. The offer expires in 17 hours 21 mins."
It showed up in your this listing, but there is no link to response or accept it.
See attached photo.
Please advise.
Thanks
Le

Here's the photo they sent:

Attachment 11134

As you can see, there is a blue box at the top of my listing which says "You have received an offer of US $120.00 from the seller. The offer expires in 17 hours 21 mins."

I NEVER sent an offer that low which immediately raised my suspicions and I did a google search of the user name, which brought me here. After looking over the list of sellers provided above, I spent some time jumping around between their various usernames, listings and feedback profiles, and I would highly recommend avoiding the following eBay users wholly:

sony-av-collector, av-collection, trans-auction, 123wonbid, youwillbesatisfied, vcr-r-us, vcrseller,

Here's what I think they did:
I believe sony-av-collector must have simply used the "Inspect html" feature of their web browser to go in and rewrite the CSS script (I believe that is what it's called), which you can do without refreshing the page and you can make practically any website read out whatever you want it to say... I'm not sure what their motive was there, maybe they thought they could trick me into thinking I had made a mistake and try to force me to stick to that "offer". I just sent them back a message saying I never sent that offer, then blocked them.

I've been an eBay seller for 18 years and I LOATHE crooked sellers and buyers. I will report this person to eBay, but I honestly don't expect them to do anything about it. I have better hopes that my message will help some more people in the future.

Thank you for providing the forum for this info.

Quick update with another sketchy eBay user...

I just had eBay user minhquanle make an offer of $115. I looked at their feedback profile and they have cross-feedback with youwillbesatisfied, vcr-r-us, and vcrseller, so you all may want to add them to your block lists as well.

I spent a little more time searching back and forth between all of these users eBay feedback profiles and I feel safe to say that audio-video-hobby is most likely also related to the others. Like the rest, they are located in Houston too. I highly suspect there are more usernames than this actually. I saw evidence of that but I am only listing the usernames of the accounts for which I have no doubt are all related.

Updated not trusted/same person list:
sony-av-collector, av-collection, trans-auction, 123wonbid, youwillbesatisfied, vcr-r-us, vcrseller, minhquanle, audio-video-hobby

Nah. It's probably just the same shady/shyster person with multiple accounts. :2cents:

I would not be surprised, I've had run-ins with that seller/username, and he's both a liar and an asshole*.

(*Note: I avoid colorful language on this site, as well as expect our members to adhere to the same decorum. But sometimes there is literally no better descriptor. Lesser words would not adequately convey what is needed.)

He also has a mostly-spotless feedback profile, but it's because of how eBay feedback works. More people need to realize that eBay feedback is not 100% representative of what has happened, and it can be scrubbed. I've left very deserved negative feedback for sellers, and it has sometimes disappeared.

Again, eBay isn't buying. It's gambling. When deals go sideways, at minimum you'll lose lots of time.

Hey guys! These scammers are still at it :(

I almost bought a Panasonic AG-1980P from user youwillbesatisfied on eBay. Good thing I ran it by lordsmurf first in PM and he warned me against buying it! (Read this whole thread for the reasons why if you're new to this concept.)

I had put in a counteroffer to his offer (which you can't retract) but luckily he didn't accept it.

Be careful out there. Now I have to look for better options.

I can affirm that sony-av-collector is a scammer. I just returned a Sony EVO-9500A deck that I had bought "there". It barely played tapes at all, and the audio circuit was completely dead. He claims he's a "tech",lol, eBay took it back without questions, indicating they're aware of him. Too bad, they're so greedy..be really careful on eBay! Tom Grant is worth the bucks, for sure.

:eek:prenerts

I remember this guy, also he has one more account: audio-video-hobby. Better to watch out..

He has a number of accounts. If it says "low hours of use" in the ad it's him. Beware

Don't be ridiculous, They cannot change the appearance of your browser unless they are remotely logged into your computer. It's an ebay feature, when you are watching an item the seller has the ability to send you an offer, it's up to you to accept it or refuse it, No one can force you to purchase anything unless you hit that button called "Buy it now" or "Accept offer".

??? No one forced me to buy it, not talking about that. Just confirming that this guy tries to pass off junk as working equip. As I said eBay accepted the return without even trying to resolve with the seller.

I wasn't responding to you, Obviously I was responding to the guy who said they changed his browser and somehow magically they made a bid on his behalf.