Slashdot Mirror
Bad eBay Experience Spurs Internet Manhunt
An anonymous reader submitted an entertaining story running on the
Chicago Trib that discusses a fraudulent eBay dealer, and the
tale of his victims
tracking him down. Nothing super technical, just amusing to read
and remember that while sometimes the crooks get away, sometimes they
become the hunted. My favorite part is when they call his mom. Man
I'd love to do that to people who DoS us :)
Recently I was defrauded on Ebay myself. It was only $6.00, but I really wanted the diapers I was buying. Well, he used an Earthlink account, and I called Earthlink, and was able to get his phone number. I recieved my diapers the next day. :)
These frauds ought to be hunted down! Credit cards companies don't help, police don't help, banks don't help, ebay certainly doesn't help, so these people did the right thing and took it into their own hands. Congratulations to them!
Derek Greene
Which can get into ticklish legal ground. I can see the lawsuits now.
which doesn't mean it wasn't effective. I mean calling the guy's mothers. How would you like that as a motivation to pay your bills?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
He should have stolen an iMac instead. We all know these aren't that tech savvy people.
Oh wait...
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
One of the things I love about the Internet and almost all of the communities that arise are the "commando" types that they engender.
Slashdot certainly has a very deoted commando group, but I'm a little surprised to see eBay having one that is so aggressive. Good for them, I guess. Typically these sorts of people are just annoying.
This guy does seem to be pretty scummy. I've done a _lot_ of stuff on eBay and have never been burned. Is that unusual? I haven't really heard of many people getting screwed by sellers. Typically buyers not sending money, which isn't such a big deal.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Seriously, if I just shelled out 3 grand for a notebook, I would consider it a veritable slap-in-the-face if eBay only compensates me 200 bucks (minus 25 dollar deductible, US$175 really) for a auction that they made money on, and that they insure.
I don't see many things wrong with this situation, only the fact that this is a testament to the power of groups and anonymity. Here you have a gander of people screwed by a common guy, united at first, then when this starts rolling all the l33t hax0rs come out of the woodwork to "help", asking for the guys CC number, SSN, and a host of other info.
I don't think I like that type of behavior. Although due process doesn't always work, we have it for a reason. Sure in a few isolated and clear cut cases like this it's easy for all of us to look at it and say "Well they got the bad guy, good for them.", but at the same time the mob mentality something like this can foster isn't pretty. What if they had fingered the wrong guy, what could have been done? You can be sure you wouldn't have been able to convince them otherwise.
Sigs are awesome huh?
How exactly did they get so much information about a guy just from an Ebay transaction?
They probably knew:
- His email address
- First and Last Name
- Phone Number (if legit)
His Meatworld address was fake. But if the phone number was real, you maybe can get a real address. But even so, how did they randomly break into his email? Password spoofers? and get his SSN and credit card info?
Was the guy sloppy maybe?
------------- I didn't know she was your sister I swear!
As to why you shouldn't use Ebay. They don't care if
you get ripped off. All they care is they get their
money. Guess that's why I stopped using ebay years ago.
I bought a 200$ item from a person in PENN. 4 other people bought similar items. I waited 30 days from auction end. Then I got their phone number through ebay, called their house, left messages daily for a week and then twice daily for the next two weeks. For the last week I to0ld them each day that on the 60th day I would be forced to file a claim with the post office for mail fraus, with ebay for fraud, and with ebay's insurer. They finally replied and sent out my item. When I got it it was damaged from shipping. Rather than go through the crap of returning it (it is still worth a little more than my $200) I cleaned it up and repaired it.
Moral: all big ticket items should go through an escrow service. Not just person to person.
comment directly in my journal
*puts on Flame Proof Suit*
Imagine how the people who get Slashdotted feel ;)
-- Dan
The fool (supposedly) shipped it via plain parcel post and no small wonder, it went missing. Rather than own up to it, and realize he made a mistake he figured it'd be easier to hang me out to dry.
Needless to say, I cancelled the credit card transaction (got my money back fine) but refused to stop there.
I sicked Discover, USPS, eBay, Billpoint/PayPal, FBI and other agencies on him for interstate mail fraud, credit card fraud, etc.
I also turned up some things in my own research - wife's name, address, phone number, etc. But the best part was having actual aerial photos of his HOUSE!
Yep, gotta love the Internet. :)
..next time we see auctions for 75 laptops from one seller, lets look up his info and just go steal them. Much better end result. Free Laptops.
Couldn't you make a game out of this??? A few try to do certain things on the internet (purchasing items, trading at E-Bay etc. etc.) and others (the whole community for all I care) have to track them down... some new form of reality tv... allow everything including hacking, cracking and lying but be aware for things such as threatening family members and friends, but I guess it could prove some great entertainment if only one could device a way to show it all... I don't think a few images of hackers on tv is that exciting...
"We live in our minds, and existance is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality" Ayn Rand
If he had their check and hadn't cashed it yet, couldn't they have called the bank and told them that the check should be cancelled/declared void or something?
- Nothing is true, everything is permitted
One of these posses will go too far and lynch the wrong guy soon. If you were a thief and knew about the possibility of retribution from angry geeks, wouldn't you set up a patsy? I know I would.
From the article:
But like vigilante gangs of the American frontier, ad hoc communities seeking justice on the electronic frontier sometimes trample the very laws they seek to enforce, as their quest for justice warps into a plot for revenge.
"You just end up with might makes right," said Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.
Is this a joke? Go to usenet fucker.
I would think it would be pretty hard to DoS Slashdot, since it has enough bandwidth to handle all the user load and still be a pretty fast site.
I think it is generally possible to track down anyone you're dealing with if you put in a bit of effort. The problem is, when I had a fraud issue, I tracked the person down in Romania! Ok, so now what the hell do I do? Grumble and move on...
Well of course it is better to contact law enforcement agencies! They really know how to get the job done!
Of course that's all bullshit. I wish the article had elaborated on legal action the AZ DA might take against the vigilantes. That will probably pan out to a prosecution. Ever notice how law enforcement will frequently go after people for criminal charges when they were victimized, but not really make an effort towards the original perpetrators?
Look at this situation. These people were told to fill out some forms, and wait 30 days to complain to eBay and maybe get about 200$ (a fraction of what all of them were scammed). Law enforcement agents simply do not know how to handle cybercrime. They would have sat on their asses, wondering how they were going to find this guy who committed fraud... and after a short while of not making any progress, move it off to the back burner.
Now of course, they have a big, huge, easy to nail target in the form of this group of people demanding justice. It's nonsense.
I think it's silly that provisions aren't in place that allow people to non-violently pursue people who screw them over. This was not always something that made sense in the "real world" because people address people face to face. They make deals with handshakes, and if someone is screwed over IRL, they probably had some physical interaction.
The Internet however, a place where a great deal of anonyminity may be gained, where law enforcement is apathetic towards real criminals, people should be allowed to take a few steps over the line. So long as there is a clear motive as to why they're digging on the wire that multiple people can attest to. Why shouldn't this group's behavior be legal?
Why bother.
This is something I wrote up for someone who'd just been ripped off by an Ebay hardware seller. Feel free to reproduce it elsewhere. Yes, I do occasionally buy hardware on Ebay (albeit very carefully!) and no, I've not yet been ripped off. By following my own advice, I hope to avoid it permanently. :)
***
I've spent a LOT of time digging around for hardware (and other stuff) on Ebay, and have read a lot in and asked around in many of the user forums there, and have reached several conclusions about hardware sellers:
The ones who do so regularly are *usually* frauds to some degree, or at least rip-off artists (selling known-junk for too much $$) and are typically difficult if you get a DOA or misrepresented part. The ones who only sell the occasional one-off component are usually okay, or at least aren't selling bad stuff intentionally.
ALWAYS read ALL of a seller's negative feedback before bidding. This means going to vrane.com (http://www.vrane.com/ef.html) and using the "search feedback" form (which BTW is rigged so you can save it and use it locally, it still calls what it needs from the server) to inspect ALL of a seller's NEGATIVE FEEDBACK. Good vendors won't have more than 0.15% negative feedback. More than 0.3% negative feedback is a redflag; more than 1.0% is invariably a bad dealer or a con artist. Positive feedback numbers and content CAN be rigged via the "penny auctions"
loophole, so in itself is fairly useless.
ALWAYS read ALL of the "NEGATIVE FEEDBACK LEFT FOR OTHERS" *by* any seller you intend to deal with. How they respond to their own bad deals is a *VERY* good indicator of how they'll be to work with in the event that what they send you is defective or is not as represented.
Sellers who use *L00K* and/or bogus phrases in their item titles (just WTF is "emulator friendly" anyway??!) are the ebay equivalent of spammers. I no longer even view items with such titles.
ALWAYS check regular online vendor outlets, Pricewatch, etc, first. Typically, used hardware sold on Ebay winds up going for 150% of the new retail price, just because most people have no clue what components really sell for. (I've seen used HDs go for 300% of retail, and used memory going for TEN TIMES the local new price!!)
Sellers who start every auction with "$1.00" prices are more likely to be "pros" at this auction business than those who start with something realistic. See above re those who sell hardware regularly on ebay.
ALWAYS email the seller prior to bidding, and ask some question about the item, even if you already know the answer. The tone of the response you get can tell you plenty about how they'll be to deal with. If you get NO response, "go look it up yourself" or a CANNED response, DON'T BID.
If they take ONLY cash, cashiers checks, or money orders for hardware, DON'T BID.
BTW for categories other than hardware, the above all apply except that there are good sellers of other stuff who do it all the time.
***
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
heh heh... some years ago i used to be an administrator at a well-known website that catered to users of a certain platform and we had a forum at that site. of course we had a few punkassbitch users who could never behave on the forum and they were invariably teeniepoopers living off the fat of the land (parent's house). i'd get their personal info and call their moms. hoooo ha, now *that's* entertainment!
It would be interesting to read the inner workings of the group. Is there a link? btw, perhaps the group could make some $$$ by using their messages to create a book of their adventure?
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
I agree, the lengths these people finally went to were OTT.
We must either (legally) police our own internet community or we'll end up getting even more restrictive laws.
I'd like to see ISP's and sites like eBay taking more responsiblity over their members. 30 days before taking action!
I don't think they are under any obligation to pay you for a bad sale, no more than the newspaper classifieds are. Their fraud protection program is clearly identified, and they are there to facilitate sales. I think buyer beware is implicit in any sort of auction site.
I have only been burned once, for a moderately small amount, but I learned quickly to avoid money order transactions and be aware of a buyer's online rating. A buyer's feedback is the best way to protect yourself, and paying with a credit card is even better (if the buyer allows it).
I like PayPal, but I don't think you get the credit card protection because you were not ripped off by the merchant who made the charge (PayPal), so I don't see how you could have very good cause for stopping payment. Has anyone ever gotten their money back from a bad PayPal transaction?
Paypal seems to have it's own share of problems. I wouldn't trust it either.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
Any way we could do this to Anonymous Coward's?
Needless to say, having directions to his house (and obviously his address) was pretty shocking to him - but sending him aerial shots of his house kind of unnerved him... Heh.
Yeah, what they did was probably innapropriate, but from their point-of-view, what were their options? Do you honestly think law enforcement would give two shits about their problems?
This probably violates Interstate Commerce, RICO, wire fraud, and possibly mail fraud, but as citizens they would probably have to fight it themselves, which would be costly and difficult to organize I think.
Ok, I'm clearly not a lawyer and have no legal training, but it seems like the little guys always get screwed.
That said, I think this sort of vigilante justice is wrong. Perhaps the right thing to do is just take it up the ass and learn from your mistake, but I can see how a lot of people would have a problem with that (including myself).
I've used ebay to both buy and sell... everything I've sold has sold for much higher than I anticipated- some of it sold for more than I could be purchased NEW!
On one hand, there is the concept of WINNING- that people lose sight of how much they are spending on an item. Next people forget about shipping- which can cost as much as the item itself.
People are also cost conscious, and usually do not want to pay extra for escrow or shipping insurance... which makes little sense if you consider many people packing merchandise are far from shipping pros.
Also, there is usually no return policy at ebay... one person's "like new" condition is another person's, "almost trash," and some sellers don't even know what they are selling (ie. a photo of a Slot 1 CPU listed as a socket chip), blah, blah, blah.
Bottom line, the mantra at ebay true is "buyer beware." I think it is great these people are going after this seller, but the fact remains, if they were truly safety conscious buyers, they could have taken additional steps to protect their purchase. I wouldn't blame ebay for only reimbursing $200. If they guaranteed every purchase, it would actually encourage fraud!
Those that suggest you "dance like no one is watching" really want to see you make a complete fool of yourself.
I am sure to look at the feedback profile of the seller when I purchase anything on ebay. I never by large ticket items from people without positive feedback. Never been burned that way, yet.
It's possible that you've been burned plenty of times in other ways. I've been buying items on eBay for over two years now, and I've found that most sellers are very good at giving you exactly what you bid on. Not having the item sent to you at all is a pretty rare thing. However, there are a few sellers who will:
1.) Lie or at least be a little disingenuous about the quality of the items up for sale. (Ex: "This was pulled from a working computer!" or "Only minor scratches!" Notice how the seller plays the game of Little Johnny Linguist by hiding behind non-committal and misleading statements.) There is little a buyer can do to prevent this besides carefully reading the item description.
2.) Rip you off on shipping. Even if buyer and seller are located on opposite coasts, the shipping and handling fees sometimes run anywhere from $5-$30 more than the actual costs involved. "Skimming off the top" like this is all too common among eBay sellers.
While I applaud the efforts of the ripped-off buyers in tracking down this scam artist, I wish that eBay would implement some sort of system for mitigating shipping costs so that the routine scamming that all of us experience will finally come to an end.
that the usual evil-government-electronic-surveilance paranoids will not care that a group of vigilantes can fuck up somebodies (real) life - guilty or not.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Speaking as one of the people having been ripped off by this seller, I just want to note that this "seller" was a complete asshole. A few weeks after not sending any of us merchandise, he claimed his mother passed away, a claim later proven false when we spoke to her. What a jerk.
I got ripped on eBay too. A couple of years ago I won an auction for Quake II. When I got it in the mail, it was nothing but a pirate copy with a nice lable. I checked out his selling history and found out that he had 8 to 10 other auctions in the last 6 months for the same thing. I also checked the current auction and found that he had 2 current auctions for Quake II. I assumed these were also pirate copies. So, I got the USPS and the FBI on his ass. 12 counts of mail fraud, computer piracy, etc. I got my money back. Got some nasy emails too, apparently the seller wasn't too happy talking to the FBI about this. Got ban from eBay, but their security sucks, he was back on with a new account in a week.
(don't get me wrong, there's a six of Shiner Bock sitting in my fridge right now. I'm just curious.)
If you only buy from sellers with consistent positive feedback, a low percentage of negatives, and a history of selling similarly priced items, you will rarely be ripped off. I've bought and sold tens of items on Ebay and only one deal went bad. I bought a lot of 3 old hard disks and sent a check, but the check was never cashed and the items were never sent (maybe the seller died, or something?).
You need to vigilantly protect your money BEFORE you send it, so you won't run into this trouble in the first place.
Anon
At least his OS is on the desktop and has real applications for it, dork. Go play with your Linux supercomputer and leave the intelligent discussion for the rest of the world.
Considering that the police will hunt them down all the same, if they're going to look for a patsy, they're going to look for a patsy even if it's the police instead of a vigilante comittee.
Just because it's the government doing the work, doesn't keep them from trying/punishing the wrong people. That's a myth in and of itself.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
"Lie or at least be a little disingenuous about the quality of the items up for sale. "
Sleezy, but nothing really wrong with it. You can't really prevent stupid people from being ripped-off. "This was pulled from a working computer!" is pretty much a standard ebay-ism for "broken", and people need to learn that.
"Rip you off on shipping."
I've heard the seller side of this -- some of them think they should be paid for the time and gas that it takes them to go to UPS and ship the thing. But it's always a rule not to bid unless you know what the shipping charges will be (I've made that mistake.)
All-in-all you are far more likely to get the shipping rip-off from a web vendor or a PriceWatch guy than on eBay.
Mexico wouldn't be that difficult I guess, I assume that you can go to the American consulate down there and get some ID to get back??? :)
maybe somewhere in the African desert or in the middle of the South-Amercian rain forests
"We live in our minds, and existance is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality" Ayn Rand
This would be more efficient:
^W^W^W^W^W^W...
While I'm sure the people involved were justified in their efforts, when you start playing games with credit cards, you're getting into some pretty murky legal waters yourself.
I personally feel that ebay should be insuring for the full value of the auction, and should charge a percentage on the sale for insurance costs. Of course, seller (or buyer) could choose to not purchase insurance, but at least it would put some pressure on ebay to handle huge cases of fraud if they happened.
Pay with credit cards if you can. Granted, there's a fee involved but the credit card companies in most cases will reimburse you if you're defrauded.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Taco! And what exactly do you think some people you DoS (you call it '/. effect')
by linking to their cablemodem-hosted homepage would like to do to YOU??
A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).
I do a lot of business over mail, phone and e-mail, and I generally charge a standard rate for shipping (depending on what's ordered, whatever,) and it's always more than the actual shipping cost. The extra amount I consider the handling fee- and it takes a lot of handling to get a shipment through.
Remember that it's the shipper's responsibility to do things like spend hours on the phone with the freight service and various other folks trying to take care of damage claims, should that be necessary.
Generally, the fee on the lower-cost, easy shipments subsidizes the higher-cost, weird, major pain in the ass type of shipments.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
I had a guy threaten me several months ago because I wouldn't forward a post he wrote to a mailing I moderate (on a software topic: Adobe GoLive) in part because it was belligerant. Eventually, I banned him. He then threatened that he'd "get me."
Well, this was pre-Sept. 11, but I thought, I don't know where he lives, I don't know how crazy he is. I had his name and his email address. I sent a note to the system administrator of the address noting that threatening email had been sent from that location. (Turned out to be his work address.) I also used Switchboard.com to get his phone number.
I called. I got what I thought was his mom (I assumed he was about 18 up to that point), but turned out to be his wife. I said, if I received any additional communication or anything happened to me or my systems, I would be reporting him to his local police and FBI. She said she's pass the message on.
A few days later I get email begging me to never get in touch with him again. I felt slightly bad: did I want him to lose his job? No. But I didn't want to worry about about a random crazy (who turned out to live about 1,000 miles away) who might hack my systems or my body up.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
eBay screams "caveat emptor", if the seller rips you off, eBay says "ebay is only a venue" and won't get inolved. If you use Paypal and get ripped off, paypal will turn around and take the money from your account due to 'investigation'.
eBay is full of scumbags and ripoff artists because they know they have a safe haven there to operate. The very worst thing that can happen to a fradulent seller is that ebay can close their account ('not a registered user'). This will usually only happen once the users' feedback rating drops to (-4), meaning they get ample opportunity to rip people off before getting canned. Then they can just sign up again under another name and start all over.
The real hallmark is ripoff types who become a cottage industry: start off selling something cheap and easy, and rack up a few good positive feedbacks. That gives you lots of space before that (-4) limit. Then just switch to selling bigger-ticket items (laptops, etc) and rip everyone off until ebay shuts you down. Use a hotmail address for the email, and put in phoney addresses and phone numbers in the contact info and you're untraceable.
Great ebay scam techniques:
One "market" you don't want to try to defraud on ebay would be the survivalist/hunting/etc niche. Think about it. Imagine doing this to a group of 10 ex-marines who have weapons permits. Not my idea of a good time. Last thing I want at my door is a bunch of guys in BDUs grinning at me. On another note, a good thing to have here would be a friend who's a judge. Have him get you an arrest warrant and then have a bunch of bounty hunters execute it. Bounty hunters (usually ex-military guys) are literally above the law when it comes to finding people who have warrants out for them.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
Sleezy, but nothing really wrong with it. You can't really prevent stupid people from being ripped-off. "This was pulled from a working computer!" is pretty much a standard ebay-ism for "broken", and people need to learn that.
And in that vein, here's my new book: Double Your IQ or No Money Back!
I've heard the seller side of this -- some of them think they should be paid for the time and gas that it takes them to go to UPS and ship the thing. But it's always a rule not to bid unless you know what the shipping charges will be (I've made that mistake.)
Disclosure: I am an eBay seller (0-10 items/month).
Well, unless you have UPS or USPS coming to you for pickup (power sellers or do all your shipping from work), I think it is fair to add a small cost for handling. Don't forget that packaging takes time; packaging also costs money, unless you ship everything Priority Mail (free boxes) and use crappy packing material (newspaper). I pack my stuff so it gets to the buyer in one piece (unless USPS does something horrible to it).
My "take" from shipping charges after factoring in the cost of packaging? -$1.00 to +$6.50 over a one month period.
Look at Amazon and Half that charge more for shipping and handling for used books than they actually give the seller. That's a real rip-off.
Someone stole my credit card number awhile back and decided to purchase 3 plane tickets with it. Luckily the airline called me right away and asked if it was OK since the people went to the counter with the card number WRITTEN DOWN on paper.
:)
The airline was nice enough to give me their names though, and I used several sites to get their phone numbers, addresses, aerial photos of their houses, and 2 of their actual photos. I printed all of the info out and I'm planning on sending it to them with a note that says they better watch who they fuck with. I should probably make a nice death scene with photoshop and their pictures in it also.
Or, I could just call my friend who works on a horse ranch, and have him get me a head from a dead horse, and I could send it to them.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
C'mon people! The fault here also lies with the users!
I mean... paying a basically untracable money order for $2000 merchandise is simply a foolish thing to do! It's basically the same as giving $2000 cash to a guy on a street corner who you don't know the name of, except as "Tito," and having him tell you "Yeah, I'll send your laptop/goods right away!" We already know about eBay users paying retail+20% already, so eBay users are not always the brightest apples.
Here. I'll spell it out for you:
1) Don't buy from someone who has like 40 negative feedbacks in the last 6 months!
2) DO NOT send someone a money order/cashier's check for something if it's more than $200 (eBay's protection of up to $200... -$25 for fees)
3) In regards to #1, do some research before sending a lot of money (thousands...) to a stranger, especially for electronics. This goes for not only if the stuff will arrive (like in this case), but whether or not it will arrive working!
GET /scripts/root.exe /c+dir
/MSADC/root.exe /c+dir
/c/winnt/system32/cmd.exe /c+dir
/d/winnt/system32/cmd.exe /c+dir
/scripts/..%/../winnt/system32/cmd.exe /c+dir
GET
GET
GET
GET
kinda sounds like what the troll hunters on the anandtech forums do when someone gets ripped off.. they often hunt down people and generally make life miserable for people who don't follow through with online trade deals..
I seem to remember a story about a fraudulent ebay seller that got hunted down and killed by one of his victims a year or two ago....
I sometimes deal with this ebay seller. She's as honest as they come -- she once sent me an unrequested refund because I overpaid her for shipping. She has ten thousand positive ratings. But she has 11 negative ratings. She does a lot of repeat business, so her positive count probably won't get much higher. But there are always bad buyers who think nothing's their fault. If she attracts 90 of those before she gets 1,000 new satisified customers, she meets your definition of "bad dealer or con artists." That's totally unfair.
And your notions of how sellers can inflate their ratings don't make any sense either. Hundreds of positive ratings from a single user would be a dead giveaway -- and wouldn't affect your rating. So you'd have to create hundreds of bogus users. I suppose that's doable with scripts. But if you're that good, you can conduct hundreds of auctions for nonexistent merchandise and sell it to yourself at inflated prices. That's not something you could detect by filtering out low bids.
But let's just say I'm wrong, and that you can fake a lot of positives. Then it makes no sense to use percentages at all! If you can always add more positives, then you can always bring your negative percentage down.
I don't think it makes sense to rely on statistics in any form. You have to get a sense of who you're dealing with. That's not something that shows up through numbers and rules-of-thumb.
And although outright fraud gets the headlines, the big hazard of buying on ebay is not crooks but flakes. And those are pretty easy to detect.
WKAT?!?!! it rea;;ly is five fives?!! deeeeeeeeeeeeeoooooptey okaydokay
for sho, man, you know that trw aint the main man no more? pass me the afro sheen a minute now ya heard
unlike some regular websites selling stuff that don't even specify..
anyway, if they did have variable shipping rates, you still won't be
able to find out if that price was true or not (unless it's USPS)
now i'm speaking as someone who sold stuff on half.com with 3 rates for
different shippers, and i hella jacked up the fedex overnight
option because xmas was coming about. would you believe that someone
actually chose it? out of a few million people searching for stuff
it only takes rich one to buy the thing. of course ebay doesn't have
such a clear choice of shipping charges aligned with shipping method
as half.com.
IN OTHER NEWS: JACKO ON HIS BACKO
No it doesn't give them the right. However the right to security goes hand in hand with the responsibility to take reasonable measures to secure oneself. What measures did the group take to secure their security? Should there be a (darwin?) penalty for failing to address the "responsibility" part of the equation?
Why not?
How easy is it to collect? Insurance is nice. Having the item is even better.
The episode speaks as much to the vigilantism latent in any community as to the hopelessness of clinging to the idea of anonymity. Personal privacy is an antiquated idea that won't hold in the 21st century and only the checks and balances, (John Locke was the ultimate prescient, political pragmatist), in place to make due process transparent and responsible to elected government will protect individual's rights. BTW vigilantism is the bane of law enforcement and many law enforcement officers will punch the buttons of someone lodging a complaint to see if their dealing with a hothead who might have been as much an instigator of the trouble as the purported badguy. Go out get the retinal scan, register your DNA and snuggle upto big brother.
heuristic algorithm seeks stochastic relationship
First of all, these people went about it all wrong. They were good, but not good enough. They used cashiers checks and money orders. Easy. Your bank can tell you who and where and with whom your check was cashed, and there is a number to call on the stub of all money orders you can use to obtain the same information. Boom. You got him at the source of his pain - his wallet. Contact the bank and the local police and FBI offices. Tell your bank to stop payment on the check (which just means your bank will make a claim for that check back onto his bank). If you can't find him, do what's more important: FIND HIS MONEY.
:)
I've completed many transactions on Ebay, and only got one slimeball. I got his contact information from ebay, and emailed him his home address and telephone number, and the date my money order was cashed, and told him he coughs up my book or he's in deep doo doo. I got a PHONE CALL from the guy begging my forgiveness. I got my book, express mail.
Derek
I had to run a search on the prick, but got previous court history and lots of other info. Even turned up his parents address and PH#. After I talked to his mom, she ended up sending me the $1800 that he owed me. Looks like mommy had to bail out her little boy again.
I had highest bid on (see my ID) a Bill the Cat really big button from someone on eBay and they kept sending excuse email about how they were doing this or that and trying to get caught up (rule 1, in my book, if you don't have time to do it, don't!) after months I recalled that I still hadn't got it nor any further explanations. I looked up the nearest city police department on the web, and they had an email address. I typed up a claim of fraud and cc'd the seller. Got things moving really fast and got my $7.50 button. :)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Said friend lives in Reno, Nevada. Decides to buy a wireless LAN kit w/a card for his laptop as well; a little package deal for $250. The seller has a semi-decent (15 positive) rating, with only one negative. My friend figures it's kosher and PayPals the money. He waits patiently, receives e-mails saying that the kit is on it's way. It never comes. And never comes. After bugging the seller, he gets a "FedEx" tracking # which doesn't work and the package never comes. Finally, the seller stops replying to my friend's e-mails. My friend files a complaint with eBay and PayPal only to discover that eBay is no longer accepting complaints about the seller because the seller has received three complaints that day already. My friend does a Netsol search on the guy's vanity address domain (which is the guys real name.com) and finds an address and phone number in Irvine, California. Since my friend came down to Southern California to help another friend move to San Diego, he stopped in Irvine along the way to my house in L.A. The seller lives in a huge, beautiful "hey I make 6 figures" type of house, but no one's home. So, my friend leaves a little set of papers at the guy's door which includes printouts of both the eBay end of auction notifications, the PayPal receipt, and printed out pages from the guy's homepage with pictures of his family. I think the printed out webpages were a creepy touch. My friend has yet to hear from the seller, but I've been told that if he doesn't respond soon, I can go beat him up.
More people should be vigilant like these people and my friend when it comes to being effed over on eBay. There's almost no consolation for folks who buy big ticket items.
Dear Policeman, I am God.
I was taken in my an employment counseling / job listing service about 6 months ago. They got me for $1800. I was pretty pissed off. I was able to figure out that the job leads that they were giving me were being pirated from Execunet. I contacted them and they put me in contact with other people who had the connection. I then began to learn that I wasn't alone. I published a web site containing all of the information about the company that took me in including their phone numbers, names of the employees, etc and then did a lot of key word optimization and online marketing. Now when you do a search on Google, I show up in the top few. As soon as Google indexed it, I started getting in a steady stream of emails from people who had just met with them but haven't given them their money yet as well as others who were also taken in and were pursuing their own individual actions against them. We now have assembled a decent size group of people and have been coordinating legal research, action, contact with the media, etc. Go Web!
Evolution: love it or leave it
You want to know what I think? I think he didn't send it at all. Maybe I'm just cynical. After all, we receive at least two or three phone calls at the ISP I work for every week from people who say they'd send us a cheque if we hook them up today. Of course, if we go and believe them (like we used to for a short tine), it never happens. And if we don't believe them and let them know they can always drop by the office in person, that never happens either.
The difference between what people *say* and what people *do* is often quite large. Especially when we're talking about people like this.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
I thought this was supposed to be an amusing story?
I got ripped off by this guy also, on an A$70 item. After not getting any response from him after mailing a money order, I filed a claim of fraudulent dealing on eBay -- according to them they should have paid me back the purchase cost less A50, i.e. A$20, but instead they sent me a cheque for A$7.50...
So it's not only fraudulent sellers you have to watch out for...
I am part of a team of developers that have created a fairly large P2P/B2P/X2Y site and I can tell you nothing pisses me off more than to have a group of Romianians post 48" JVC plasma TVs for 1,800 (USD) and have honest (yet stupid) buyers fall for it. I'm not sure how the other auction site's backends are setup, but we are able to watch every step of a transaction. There have been times when I have wanted to end a transaction and tell the buyer, "Hey, genius, you know why this guy's not charging shipping? because he's not going to send you the damn TV!!" Unfortuantely, unless the seller has been proven to be a scammer, there isn't much we can do but beat our heads against our desk. I can only imagine how ebay must feel.
/.'ers keep their transactions safe.
BTW, I'm interested in the different ways
Although it turned out to be useful in this case, isn't it a bit disconcerting that someone with a random grudge against you can dig up that much information against you. It almost seems as though identity theft is accessable to average people now, instead of specialized criminals.