A soldier from Plattsmouth is putting his life on the line while his wife is fighting a battle back home. The computers she paid for never arrived.

James Paczkowski supervises convoys in Iraq and when off duty he takes correspondence courses for a degree. Jana Paczkowski says that's not easy because her husband must use shared computers at base Internet cafes.

Jana was hoping to get a laptop computer to give to her husband and she went online to track one down.

She lost a bid for two laptops on eBay but the seller made a second chance offer for $800 and Jana says, "Everything looked legit."

She wired the money to a man in London even though she tells us that $800 is, "a lot of money for us. We live paycheck to paycheck"

But the offer under an eBay logo was a spoof and Jana won't get the laptop or her money back.

Ms. Paczkowski says, "I guess I'm naive in the way I trust people and you treat people as you want to be treated."

A spokesman for eBay says, "We hate to hear about these, particularly in this woman's case but this took place off eBay and it's not a legit second chance offer."

He suggests that customers click on My eBay to verify transactions and not wire money for online auction purchases.

The advice from eBay is to use a third party service such as PayPal or BidPay.

Here's a good reason to be careful. The Federal Trade Commission reports that Internet auctions are the biggest source of fraud complaints. There were more than 60,000 nationwide last year.

Nearly 500 of those complaints came from Nebraska and more than 800 were from Iowa.