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When Good Ebay'ers Go Bad
An anonymous submitter sent in: "This guy "Stewart Richardson" had over 6000 positive feedbacks on eBay, held a fake estate sale, and scammed around $250,000 out of people before disappearing. 'There seems to be little doubt among his would-be customers that Stewart Richardson pulled off one of the most remarkable con jobs in the almost seven-year history of eBay, and U.S. federal investigators agree.' Some other links: a messageboard and ebay itself. I was scammed on eBay for $3600 a while back. I was able to get my money back because I had a bank issued cashier's check. I had written "For Deposit Only" on the back, and that was crossed out by the recipient. The bank teller should have been suspicious, but was not, and cashed the check. The idiot who had it cashed wrote his bank account number on the back of the cashier's check, and also wrote his Dad's business bank account number on the back and stamped it with his Dad's signature. In the end, the bank reversed the payment, and took the money out of his Dad's account. When his Dad found out, the idiot was in some serious trouble, but I got my money back. There were a few other's scammed in the same transaction, and they recieved about half of the money back after the police started to put the pressure on these guys. The story is much more involved, so I won't go into the rest of it."
If it's worth spending $40 for shipping, it's worth spending a little more to ensure you're getting what you're _expecting_!
If the seller won't use an online escrow service (www.tradenable.com has worked well for me in the past) then DON'T BUY THE PRODUCT!
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Of course they do. Shill bidding and having other people you know bid on items is something very common, and has been even before Ebay. Ebay clearly prohibits it, and afaik, has a pretty good system for detecting when different accounts have a suspicious amount of cross-bidding or winning of auctions.
As such, I don't think this is the case here, I'm sure the previous legigimate business that this seller conducted was with real other buyers. You don't get your rating this high on fake accounts without getting caught, it's just not doable.
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You would have to put a huge amount of effort into doing this. The thing that keeps this from being a big problem is the fact that only one positive feedback can result from any given buyer-seller relationship on Ebay. In other words, if I buy three items as separate auctions on Ebay, I can only give the seller a net 1 positive feedback. I can certainly submit a positive for the other two transactions, but they aren't counted in the total. So, you'd have to go thru the trouble of setting up a separate ID for every single feedback point you got this way.
Terry
Ya, how about Operation Bullpen, the sports memoribilia bust that took on a whole ton of fake signature dealers on Ebay...
Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
Escrow, Escrow, Escrow.
From eBay's escrow information page (the last link):
What is Escrow?
Escrow is when a buyer places money in the custody of a trusted third party. The money is then paid to the seller once a specified set of conditions, that both parties have agreed to, are met.
How does it work?
Very simply. The Buyer pays into escrow. The Seller ships the item to the Buyer. The Buyer approves the item. Funds are paid to the Seller. It's that easy.
Is the service only available for items that close over $500?
Based upon historical data, eBay recommends that buyers and sellers use escrow services for transactions greater than $500.
So, if you buy something over $500, and pay for it using escrow, the seller does not receive payment until you have determined that the item was shipped and works properly.
Use escrow for any serious purchases. Don't rely on eBay's fraud program -- it takes months to get them to do anything and they often want ridiculous amounts of documents "proving" that the item was faulty.
Informed consumers make these issues moot. Don't buy from a seller who won't use escrow, and add in the extra fees as a cost to doing business via eBay. If you don't use escrow, you assume the risk if the product isn't what you wanted (or doesn't arrive at all!)
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I beleive that eBay has bid bots that work in the same way that the sellers do in an effort to pump the bids up to the max bid without going over. I will tell you why?
Several months ago a friend got suspicious when he won an auction for a no-name retro video game. He was suspicious because someone had bid against him with an "updated or changes username" and always bid some strange amounts at varying time intervals. The stranger would come on, bid, and then wait for some period of time to up the bid a little more. Then in a last two days the stranger bid exactly one dollar below my friends max bid, triggering it and getting all the money out of my buddy.
Most people would say coincidence. I thought so too, so we made another experiment with another seller. Another video game and we put $100 as the max bid on the game. This game wasn't rare or collectible in the slightest. As the auction went on, a similar activity occured. This time in the last hours of the auction the bid got bumped in the same way. The user knew that the game wasn't worth more that 10-15 bucks and probably wouldn't want to overbid and lose all the money,so it's unlikely in my opinion that it was the seller.
The auction ended and a $15 product was sold for $96 with this strange business described earlier.
My question? Who knows what the max bid is? eBay.
Who gains when the max bid is retrieved as the selling price? The seller and eBay.
So it's in thier interest that any max bid be reached, by hook or by crook. I don't trust them, so I bid at the last minute and get things at the price I want to pay for them.
Spongebob
Here's some things you can do to make your ebay purchase a safer experience.
1. Involve the United States Post Office. Once you involve them, you have them on your side becaues they really hate mail fraud. You can contact your postmaster and he can usually start the investiation rolling. Remember, mail fraud is a federal offence.
2. Contact the seller. If the person is not willing to talk to you directly on the phone about a high ticket item you are buying, do you really want to do business with him?
3. Not to be redundant, but ESCROW ESCROW ESCROW. If you are spending over $50, isn't the extra $5 or $10 worth it?
4. Use a real credit card and not a debit card that withdraws from you bank account. Discover is probably one of the best I've used. Any problems I've had, they have immediately put a hold on the money, and credit my account with the money in question, until they can get it sorted out.
5. Use your head. If something seems to good to be true, then it is, especially on the internet.
I just don't understand why people are having this many problems with online purchases. If you follow these simple steps you will not come accross any problems that you can't get resolved. Are you guys really this trusting? Come on now, it's the internet, don't trust anyone. If you're getting ripped off like this, to be honest, you probably deserve it. Maybe you should rethink this internet purchasing thing, it might not be for you.
SIG - I love you guys, mod me to +5 then bash me back down to +2.
Never been scammed on ebay, but...
.edu addresses. These are much harder to fake, and are generally pretty easy to track down. Most of the people on the newsgroup tended to be students or people affiliated with universities, so that wasn't too big a problem.
Back before the whole ebay thing, I used to participate in newsgroup based auctions for a once-popular CCG. Back then, there was no PayPal or online escrow services, so we employed other tactics to try to ensure that we didn't get ripped off.
First, many people would only trade with people that had legitimate
When someone did get ripped off, they posted to the newsgroup about it. Someone maintained a list of bad traders (both virtual and physical addresses) that people checked before trading anything. Bad traders were given the opportunity to defend themselves, but most complaints were usually legit.
Overall, there were supprisingly few scams. I conducted nearly 3000 trades and was only ripped off once (tho it was for over $2000). Many of my friends had similar results. I don't know what the ebay statistics are like, but I would imagine that they aren't as good.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
In my experience, the 0.01% fraud rating claimed by the eBay rep is probably about right. I've only had one or two people who seemed out and out determined to screw me. That tiny number doesn't take into account the much higher clueless/careless seller factor, however.
More than 1 transaction in 10 has had a problem for me. The most common problem is bad packaging. I've received computers in boxes with no padding whatsoever. I've gotten CDs in half-opened cases with a scratch raked across the surface. I've even received cards in nothing but bubble wrap and a flexible mailer.
eBay, PayPal and the likes are absolutely worthless about helping in cases where something arrives, but doesn't work. Sellers who promise to ship with insurance usually don't, or aren't helpful about your filing a claim. They have their money, and so they want to be done with you.
You just have to figure out what the failure rate is, and be sure you're bidding low enough to compensate. Me, I won't bid more than 90% of what I think something is worth, and I won't bid on something I absolutely need soon.
The feedback system also isn't nearly as valuable as it seems. People are afraid to give bad feedback unless the other person has already left their feedback, otherwise, they're guaranteed to get negative feedback in turn. It's actually in a person's personal best interest to leave no feedback at all when a transaction has gone bad, and I suspect the scammers know this, and don't leave the initial feedback accordingly.
Sorry but you get positive feedback very very easily. you just email the customers saying if you give me positive feedback I'll give you some.. well there it goes, you are guarenteed 1 feedback point on EVERY sale.
Sorry but praise is for when they went above and beyond... did an excellent job and made you orgasmatically happy. otherwist it's nutral.
this is why I put ZERO value on ebay ratings except for negative feedback. someone with 90,000 positive and 20 negative is a shady character to me compared to the guy with 20 good and no negative.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
> Why would I buy something from somebody I don't know, and can't get *real* info on.
Because you can't get it anywhere else, that's why. Ebay has a TON of stuff you can't find anywhere for great prices. It all depends on how averse to risk you are. Some people play the lottery, some people use Ebay. Personally, I've had much better luck with Ebay than the lottery.
The shipping invoice usually (but not always) shows how the shipment was paid for. If it was a credit card, it'd show the last four digits or something. Besides, wouldn't you be a little suspect if you were expecting a package from a private individual and instead got a package from "ABC Digital Cameras"?
Check it out.
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