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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 :)
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. :)
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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.
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~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I don't know why people are promting this blind faith in PayPal. Anyone can get a verfied paypal account, and lots of scammers do.
There's this thing called an Escrow Service which removes the risk from a transaction. You should use it anytime you couldn't live without the money you are sending off. If you bought a $2000 computer without using one, you are either stupid or richer than I am. Yes, it costs the buyer money. No, PayPal is not an escrow service.
The only thing that PayPal seems to provide is a piece of mind that you can go and post on PayPalSucks.com when you get ripped off, instead of blaming the guy who ripped you off or yourself.
The great thing about eBay is the "garage sale" aspect, not the fact that it's an ad board for real businesses. There's lots of people who have only sold a few things and haven't got around to a PayPal account, and if you are careful you shouldn't have any problem.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
It might seem like a slap in the face, but there's a couple things to remember here:
One, eBay doesn't really make money on auctions from scammers. eBay bills monthly, and I doubt the guy is really sitting around with a credit card just waiting for eBay to charge him. I work for a company that charges our members monthly, and going after people with insufficient funds in their account is sorta like asking a VC for charity. So that pretty much puts eBay out the $175, plus the costs of investigating the fraud.
If you look at PayPal's financials, you can see that PayPal paid out $5.5 Million out of their $31MM in revenue in 2001 for "transactional losses" i.e. Fraud claims. In 2000, before they had their shit together, they paid out $11MM, $2.5MM MORE than their revenue for that year!!! I'm sure that eBay has a similar amount of cost in terms of Fraud Liability, albeit perhaps slightly less, since their credit card division (eBay Payments) is a bit smaller than PayPal. So while $200 is a pathetic insurance amount for a $3k notebook, it's better than nothing.
Two, my advice is that you should never buy anything on eBay over $200 using anything other than a credit card. Even if the guy has 2000 positive feedback, it's just asking for trouble. With a credit card, you can always initiate a chargeback, and 99.9% of the time, you'll get your money back.
Caveat Emptor. It's the name of the game, if you don't know the person you're buying from.
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.