the default scam I always come across is people bidding on their own stuff on ebay, there's this one person I've been trying to by an old PC off, after the third time of me bidding on it and them relisting it while it was always won by the same account (and that wasn't the only listing, they've relisted all their stuff constantly) I just gave up, I kept reporting it to ebay every single time... but it's not like they care, since they make money off scammers anyways.
I come across this so many times now that I check ebay more often, it is pretty easy to spot with some common sense even if you don't see account names in the bidders list.

Miphee wrote:

My most recent find is this 386 board with a coprocessor. It's sold as working. You can clearly see the damage caused by the battery. Most of the traces are gone above the BIOS chip extending to the corner of the board, the cache and the memory modules are affected as well. The seller asks twice the amount of what it's worth undamaged.

Be careful. Unless you bought it and the board is in fact not working, you are only accusing someone for committing scam by making guesses from a picture. Also, I'm not sure if you perhaps confusing scam with extortion (gross overcharge).

imi wrote:

people bidding on their own stuff

It happens on local sites as well, but they are dealt with quickly. The advantages of smaller platforms. Ebay is too big to care.

derSammler wrote:

Be careful.

I know, but I'm not accusing anyone. Merely showing pictures of actual listings without naming them.
If that board is working properly I happily go to court. 😁
But the point of the thread is to help others avoid buying broken hardware.

eBay doesn't even care about serial bid retractors (used to find your max bid - they keep increasing their bids until they're leading, then retract and bid just under).

Miphee wrote:

You can clearly see the damage caused by the battery. Most of the traces are gone above the BIOS chip extending to the corner of the board, the cache and the memory modules are affected as well.

Pretty bad indeed.

But if you are lucky this can still be booting by fluke. Possibly without cache, keyboard, missing power lines on ISA, DRAM, etc.

Hard to tell...

it probably turns on, and that's enough for people to call it "working" ^^

jmarsh wrote:

eBay doesn't even care about serial bid retractors (used to find your max bid - they keep increasing their bids until they're leading, then retract and bid just under).

well that's one reason why I only ever bid at the end of an auction, I just enter the amount I'm willing to pay, and if I win, I win and if I don't I don't, also has the advantage that I don't get tempted to ever increase my bids either ^^, there's been this other seller who kept ending their auctions over and over again a few minutes before they ended because nobody bid yet so nobody bids something low at the last minute... probably was one of those trying to do that.

Another thing to look for are writings on the hardware that aren't supposed to be there. All signs of attempted repairs.
These listings are always sold as working but without any guarantees so the buyer has to take the risk.

mpe wrote:

But if you are lucky this can still be booting by fluke. Possibly without cache, keyboard, missing power lines on ISA, DRAM, etc.

I have 20 corroded boards waiting to be fixed that look better than this mess. If this board would post I would just shake the guy's hand who designed it. The main problem is the AT supply input being so close to the leak. +5V and +12V inputs are certainly gone because they go under the battery. Thick traces are no match for the acid either.