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What Can You Do When Defrauded on eBay?
"Most of us followed the proper procedures. You wait 30 days to file a fraud claim on ebay. Then you have the option of getting $175 at most from eBay's insurance. It softens the blow, but for many it's not anywhere close to what they lost. Contacting local authorities hasn't accomplished anything nor has filing with the FBI. Many people who paid via PayPal did get a refund, but others paid via checks.
eBay has been one of the bright spots of the internet. As a NYSE listed company, you'd expect more to be done about helping customers. I hope this question comes as a warning to be more cautious on eBay or not to bid for items on ebay over $400 without escrow protection. I've learned my lesson not to do business with anyone who doesn't use paypal or billpoint. But regardless of what we learned, most of us feel helpless because eBay has not done more to get our money back. Any suggestions?"
Auction fraud is illegal, I believe there is a way you can file with the FTC and have the fraudelant seller fined thousands of dollars, or even possibly jailed. IIRC, something about interstate commerce, or whatknot. I think you may also get a full refund of the amount of money you were defrauded from, or a portion of the money collected by the FTC in fines; I don't remember which.
Look in to it.
JKoebel
I shop ebay quite often, and though I've had a few bad experiences, I've managed to let them go...
1. From one seller, in 4 different auctions I bought 4 15" monitors for $25 a piece. Shortly after I sent him a money order for the combined total of the 4 auctions, this guy seemed to disappear off the face of the earth. His user account was cancelled, his email address bounced mail, and his phone number was disconnected. eBay didn't do anything for me at all.
2. I bought a Cisco 3000 router that claimed to have 16 MB of RAM and 8 MB of Flash (enough to run IOS 12.0). I receieved the product which had barely enough flash & ram to run IOS 9.0 (worthless nowadays). I contacted the seller, he promised to send me the replacement RAM & Flash, he sent me some bunk chips that didn't even fit in the device. After numerous other emails and phone calls with no answers, I finally gave up. ebay didn't do anything for me on this one either.
3. I won an auction for a bootleg TOOL video. I sent the guy the $14 total, and I never received a product. Apparently this guy screwed over 4 other people bidding on the same item from him, we all left negative feedback. This time the amount was not enough for ebay to care.
Each time I filled out one of ebay's fraud reports, and never EVER got a response. Since these losses weren't too important, they were all things I never really needed, just impulse buys that would have ended up sitting in a corner taking space, I don't really fret over it. Plus, if you believe that the grand scheme of things fits together in one huge orchestrated puzzle that meshes together... they'll get what's coming to them.
If you paid by check or money order, though, you're just plain silly. Just because a seller has a fancy auction page or a good feedback rating doesn't mean you should send a check for $400-1000 to a total stranger somewhere else in the country and expect the seller to make good on it. Where's your common sense? People get busted for that all of the time and auction sites account for the majority of fraudulent online activity. So think before you pay next time, and good luck getting your money back.
-CT
I've used paypal numerous times successfully w/o a problem. Whether sending money from my bank account to someone just for the purposes of cash or purchasing on eBay. There was one problem with an eBay transaction. Suffice to say, the guy never fulfilled his obligation and proceeded to not respond for a month, then I notified paypal, they did their investigation and within a week I received a phone call notifying me that they had refunded the $539.00 -- problem solved. I'm not sure whether the guy had his paypal acct. yanked or who knows what action paypal took, but, problem solved on my end. ;)
:wq
For any significant amount of money on eBay I send the postal money order by U.S. Mail. The penalties for mail fraud are quite severe and the post office does like to investigate reports of same.
See if any of the buys used the U.S. Mail and/or a postal money order. If so, have that person or persons file a complaint with the postmaster of their zip code, and have him reference the other cases that you have dug up.
sPh
Less than 66% of internet users have not been a victim of online fraud... Per victim, the price of fraud hovers around $600, which is more than most research estimates of average online retail spending.
What this means is that 34% of all internet users have been screwed over (if you believe their report). Show me another industry that has that high a fraud rate - there isn't, why? 'cause the Fed's would come down hard.
This just isn't acceptable.
I just got done with a fraud battle on Ebay and this page was of immense help, and eventually got me my full money back from the bastard who tried to swindle me:
t ml
http://www.mindspring.com/~bookdealers/ripoff.h
Pay particularly close attention to the sections on reporting the fraud to the IFCC section of the FBI, and the Postal Inspector fraud complaint form.
In the postal inspector's case, when you file a fraud report, they notify the person that they're being investigated. This led to me promptly getting a $600 money order from the criminal in question. They actually had the money order to me in a day, and it cost them $25 to mail it. File reports galore, and try to get as much information about the person that you can.
Paypal will only protect you if you pay with a credit card
Not true! Paypal will cover any transaction, provided you follow some simple and quite obvious steps:
- Conduct transactions with verified users
- Ship/send money only to the listed address
- Use some common sense and not deal with someone who... say..., wants that new computer bought at $300 shipped overnight to a MailBoxes Etc., doesn't care shipping is going to cost $250, and says he's paying with a credit card (which just happens to be in the name of someone else).
Really, how hard is it to spot things like this? Same thing applies to sellers. Ship to confirmed address and have paperwork/tracking numbers to back up your end of the transaction. I deal on Ebay all the time, people have tried to screw me over, but I take some common sense. In every case, I've either got my money back, or a replacement from the seller.
Of course, on the other hand, the support systems of both Ebay and Paypal are terrible. It's not uncommon for it to take 4 or 5 days to get an illegal auction cancelled (bulk email addresses) on Ebay, or a month to report a spammer using Paypal as a payment vehicle.
It becomes possible mail fraud if they don't deliver within the time alloted and they don't notify of delays or offer a full refund.
o me .htm
For details and to file a complaint:
http://www.usps.com/postalinspectors/fraud/welc
"I may be Love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it."
The problem with reputation is that it's just so easy to buy! Lets say I go place 20 bids on random crap and my $1 bid wins
Well, gee... Your saying maybe we ought to look at the actual circumstances of the transaction rather then some overall number? Anybody who does Ebay business regularly should look at the seller's actual auctions. More than once I found deadbeats trying to build up feedback like this. Usually a ring of new accounts, all selling ridculous things like "Used condom" or "Banana peal" for $0.01 that closed 5 minutes after it opened with the "Buy it Now" feature. Easy... report them, accounts closed, move on with life.
Just set up a ring of ebay accounts, bid on each other's stuff, and have it sell for higher values
Well, that's a good idea too, it's called "Shill bidding" and it's against the rules. Again, by looking at the actual auctions you can easily detect this. Don't just look at the feedback of the seller, look at the feedback of those who left the seller's feedback, and the feedback of those who left the feedback of those who left feedback. Are they all the same people? Are they all new users whose account were all created the same day? If so, it's a pretty obvious clue there's some fraud going on.
Most criminals aren't very smart, instead they just rely on others being dumber than they are.
About a year and three months ago I purchased a Porsche 944 off of ebay. And although I was promised a warrenty, the company who handeled the guys warrentys would not provide one for my car. I had transmission problems, muffler problems, air conditioner problems, and brake problems. I had finally given up when a representative from the state of New Jersey called me and informed me they were orgonizing a Class Action Lawsuit against the individual who sold me my car.
This seems the way to go, collect information about the one individual, and bring it to the state. I happen to be fortunate because he forged my signiture several times when providing documents to the state, so I have a very strong case, so perhaps people might not have as good luck as I do.
The downside is I provided all of this information to the state, and it has still been 10 months, and I have not got word on how the case is progressing.
IFCC FBI Complaint Center
One of their prime purposes is to handle online fraud.
The FBI has a unit that handles nothing but online auction fraud. They are notorious for handling auction fraud quickly and seriously, but due to the sheer volume of cases they probably have a hard time getting to everyone. Poke around at the FBI until someone puts you in contact with these people.
I won an auction from Yahoo auctions a while back from a guy who had something like a 300 feedback rating. "Great!" I thought, "No chance of getting ripped off here!" I place my bid, win the auction, and then I notice, the guy had, I don't remember exactly, but somewhere between 80-100 negative feedbacks with about 400 or so positive feedbacks. he had ripped off 20-25% of his customers, but by sheer volume managed to obtain an incredibly high rating.
My auction was for a video card, and it was like, $35+$10 shipping. And my case wasn't all that bad, it was supposed to be "new in box" but it obviously wasn't. The box was cut up, will all UPC info, and even some of the specs cut off. The card was in an open static bag, and the "brand new" manual bad was taped back together. I complained, and the guy claimed he just opened it to make sure it worked ok, but it was obviously BS. But, the card did work, and it _was_ actually the right card and all, so I didn't bother filing any official complaints or anything.
Other people's auctions were things like "untested, as-is hard drives". Of course the guy had tested them, because among a lot of 10 or 20, not a single one would be good. The guy's responses to his negative feedback were things like "I said it's as-is, what do you expect?".
Here's another flawed aspect of auction feedback ratings though. I have a 118 positive feedback rating on ebay, with no neutrals or negatives. I have a 1 positive feedback rating on yahoo, 2 positive, 1 negative. What's my negative from? This guy. I, of course, left negative feedback, and the bad seller, in retailation, left negative feedback for me. I don't think I'd ever leave negative feedback for anyone on ebay, because I KNOW they'd leave negative feedback for me as retribution, and it would ruin my perfect reputation. That's a really crappy situation, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's dealt with it.