I think the above logo should say ‘”Alibaba.com – Global scamming starts here”. It’s right, Alibaba is nothing but a site full of scammers. There are so many of them that they now dominate genuine sellers and Alibaba despite knowing all this seems little interested in cleaning up the mess.

The other day, I was looking for a Apple iPhone 3GS on Alibaba. I found many good deals there and some were mouth watering. Most of the deals were for orders with minimum 5 quantities. While that can be understood, as they might have thin margins, but they only accepted western union for payment. I had a chat with a few sellers there and what’s worth noting is these so called sellers claim to be from U.S. but from their English you can figure out that they are SURELY not. Also, upon asking one such seller “Where in U.S.?” after a long time he replied “I am in U.S. but now ship from U.K.” I then asked “Ok, where in U.K.?” No reply. Whenever you start a chat with a seller there, they just start pushing you to make payment via western union without clearing ANY of your doubts.

Till now, I have had a chat with about 6 sellers there, 2 of which ‘claimed’ to be from U.S. and NONE of them answered ANY of my questions and just kept me pushing for payment. If you talk anything apart from payment, they don’t answer you. I searched rigorously for reviews of Alibaba and everywhere I could find people getting scammed.

While I am not saying that Alibaba has only scammers and no genuine sellers but thing is the scammers outnumber genuine sellers there. So it becomes too difficult to distinguish between them. I have read at most places that after taking payment, these sellers don’t even ship anything. And since they asked for western union payment, you cannot do anything once they cash it out!

So my advice to dear readers, please think 1000 times before shopping on Alibaba. It’s better to spend few bucks extra than lose all of your money and the mental frustration. It’s just not worth the deal!