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. :)
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?
*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.
I've been burned 3 times. but out of the hundred or so auctions I have won in the last 5 years... they don't really bother me much.
first was a $10 win on a bootleg video for my favorite band, TOOL. I sent out $10, I got back nothing. I think the seller got busted for distributing bootleg videos. I just wish I had got mine.
Second was for a Cisco 3101 dual ethernet router that was advertised to have 16 MB ram and 8 MB of flash. I got it, pretty quick shipping I might add. However it didn't have 16 MB of ram and 8 MB of flash, it had 4 and 2, respectively. With that little memory.. you couldn't route CRAP nowadays (it was a project router, but I still wanted to run IOS 12.0). Well, I wrote the guy, he apologized and said he'd send the replacement ram/flash. He sent me 4 sims from a compaq and 2 flash chips from godknowswhat. I wrote him back and told him that he sent me the wrong stuff, and he apologized and said he'd send me the replacement ram/flash. I got 4 sims in the mail, it was 4 1MB cisco sims. I got exactly what I already had. The guy was stupid, apparently he was the proprietor of a warehouse of similar stuff and was hawking it on ebay, but didn't know what it was that he was selling. I ended up buying my own ram, and I use TFTP to boot it so I don't need flash.
and last was a lot of 5 used 15" monitors, I paid $120 for the lot to include shipping. A week after my money order was cashed the guy seemed to disappear. His ebay account was restricted, his phone number disconnected, and his website was gone. The guy had a LOT of positive feedback, so I thought the guy was for real. I'm thinking he got arrested or got "cleaned" by the mob or something. It sucked but I got over it.
Well of course it is better to contact law enforcement agencies! They really know how to get the job done!
Of course that's all bullshit. I wish the article had elaborated on legal action the AZ DA might take against the vigilantes. That will probably pan out to a prosecution. Ever notice how law enforcement will frequently go after people for criminal charges when they were victimized, but not really make an effort towards the original perpetrators?
Look at this situation. These people were told to fill out some forms, and wait 30 days to complain to eBay and maybe get about 200$ (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?
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.
You don't send a guy $3000 with a payment method you can't stop for a product you've never laid eyes on. If the guy won't take a check and won't take payment through an escrow service, screw it. It's not worth the risk.
eBay didn't do anything wrong here.
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.
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
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.