Went like this.
Motorcycle advertised with "buy it now" figure well under the usual going price (less than half).
Bidding only to "pre-approved" bidders, ie you had to send the seller an email first before you could theoretically bid. Seller also had 0 Ebay history.
Bike looked excellent in the photos, but the description of it was very brief (colour, speedo reading and model) and no details as to chassis or engine numbers or rego.
Auction ended with no winning buyers - there were no bids listed.
Seller was contacted after the auction to see if the bike was still for sale.
Sellers story was that they had taken the bike from Australia to NZ but could not get it registered there because of non-compliance and were to be transferred to another country for work and had to sell it quick.
The deal could be still be done as the bike had'nt sold and still using the Ebay security features for buyers. All i had to do was send them my ebay user name and address, they would then notify ebay that i was the nominated buyer.The money would be put into a holding account until the motorcycle was shipped over to a holding facility at an extra cost of $1000. I could then view the bike where i could then notify ebay all was ok and the monies would be released to the seller and the bike to me.
None of my questions regarding the bikes' identity numbers were answered. The seller stated they would not tell me those details for fear the numbers could be used in a cloning fraud.
Needless to say it all sounded a bit suss. a quick search of the usual secondhand bike web sites for the same model bike and quess what? Exact same bike listed for sale with a dealer in WA! Scammer had copied the photos into their Ebay ad after carefully cropping out the web site watermark logo. The scammer had also included a photo showing the rego plate which matched the same photo in the legit site. The supposed pre-approval process was a means of obtaining email addresses where the deal could be done outside of ebay and without any of its security checks.
Moral - you've heard it neaps of times before - if its too good to be true, its not.
Read the other guides relating to buying and selling scams, all good sources of info - be smart and get informed.