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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."
Buyer Beware:
Always make the other peson take the risk in an online transaction.
If you want to buy something, they want YOUR money so make THEM send you the product first.
If you want to SELL something, get THEIR money first, then send the product. THEY want what you have. If both parties are stubborn then by default they can be trusted.. (not!)
COD isn't foolproff and Paypal isn't either..
'mmmmmmmmm.... forbidden donut'
It's a classic scam. Build up a rep for being honest, upright, soforth. Once everyone trusts you, you can strike it big with little difficulty. It requires a lot of patience, but police and government officials in Third World (and some first and second world) countries have been known to use it. Instead of taking measly little bribes all the time, make yourself out to be "incorruptible" and wait for the big one.
The big question is: Did this guy plan it from the beginning? If he did, I applaud his patience and cunning, while also disapproving of the result of his actions. If he decided on the spur of the moment to do this, i.e. let temptation get the better of him, I have nothing but contempt for him.
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
I bought one very high ticket item on EBay once (admittedly this was a while ago), an expensive Sony video camera. Before I mailed off my $1900 cashier's check, I got the other person's phone number and actually spoke to them. In this way, I felt I had at least some recourse in case something went wrong. Fortunately nothing did, and I have happily used my TRV 900 for years now.
The point is that the more information you have about your seller, the easier it will be to go after them in case something goes wrong. People can hide via email, but by phone it's much harder.
-- What is this Earth thing you call "slow"?
With a system like ebay where the transactions are completely up to the seller and the buyer, it's bound to have these types of scams running all the time. Unless some company develops a more secure way of conducting internet auctions, I never plan on spending more than I can afford to lose, it's always a gamble, even if that person you're buying from has 25 smiley faces ratings underneath his name.
I hate to use a terrorism analogy, but this is classic sleeper strategy: join a community, establish your reputation, and after a while you become immune from suspicion simply because people "know you". eBay users know to be suspicious of people with 0 feedback, and they're told by eBay management that people with high (~1000) feedback are "reliable".
If you're considering making a significant purchase over the Net, think about who you're dealing with. Even if they do have thousands of people shouting their praises in positive feedback, you should ask yourself - how much can you really trust an abstract online handle?
Hard work has a future payoff. Laziness pays off now.
It has happenned to me a couple of times - in all instances though, the "top place" buyer either had a zero feedback rating (ie, possibly never intended to buy the product to begin with), or was booted off eBay soon after the auction ended.
In all cases, the seller contacted me a week or two after the auction ended, and asked if I still wanted it for my bid price. Sometimes I declined, having bought the item through another auction, or locally. Other times I accepted, and got the item a couple of weeks later.
I personally have no problem with this - if the seller seems sincere and has a good track record, and the product warrants it (by either being some kind of "dutch" auction, or by being a unique item - not liable to be seen again for many years), I will go for it.
But, as this story illustrates, sometimes good sellers (or what appear to be good sellers) "go bad" (sounds like a bad Fox show - heh).
The one thing I always keep in mind (since I learned about it) is to use an escrow service for pricey items - it is the safest method...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
In all my years on eBay, I have never seen any seller offer or even seriously think about sending the goods before they have the money. What you're saying here is not realistic for online transactions. Unless you use escrow, someone has to send first, and chances are much higher for a person to get an item and then never pay.
Credit cards aside, try to go into any store and get them to give you items with a promise to pay later. It just doesn't work that way. The buyer wants the item, that's why they're buying it - so they have to be willing to part with the funds first.
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This is exactly why you should always use your credit card for payment. And I don't mean through PayPal or BillPoint. If the seller has that high a feedback, and a legitimate business, he should have his own merchant account to process the credit card payment. If you haven't received your goods within the 60 days after your statement arrives, simply dispute the charges, and you won't lose anything.
At one time, I did write a proof of concept back orifice/shell script that would scan entire subnets, and report "hits". Had I followed up with it, and used it... who knows how many you could collect? Most ebayers are windows users through and through, and it wouldn't be anything to write a "buttplug" (BO plugin, god I love how cDc names things) that just sat there waiting for the password prompts. Ebay has this annoying habit of forgetting your password, if you switch between buying and selling, and you have to re-enter it quite often (or is it just netscape/linux doing this?). Or, even if he had to go a bit more sophisticated and steal the "logged in" cookie out of the machine, this wouldn't be implausible. Voila. 99 times out of 100, he'd get joe@aol.com that only has feedback of 2, but he gets lucky this time. Bam, motherload... feedbaack in the 1000's. Decides it's his ticket out of script kiddy land, and into the realm of bigtime h4ck3rs. Meanwhile, rfenet or whatever his name is, is on vacation in the bahamas for a month. Hates the email, doesn't want to check it, just relax.
What about this is impossible? It's nothing to change your email address in ebay, so the script kiddy redirects them to another email account where he can say "please use this paypal account, or mail me a cashiers check". Hell, in the bad part of downtown, there are a dozen places that never ask to see photo ID, they just take a 10% cut. And my city isn't even that big.
Did this really happen? I doubt it, but all the pieces are in place. You have to wonder.
In essence an Escrow scam is exactly what this person pulled. By getting such a high postive feedback rating he earned the trust of his buyers. What is Escrow? It's you trusting another party with your money. I'm guessing that the chances of an Escrow company waiting for one big score are just as good as some well respected ebay auctioneer. The best part about the 'official' escrow scam is that the scammer gets the money and the merchandise. Don't think it can happen? Neither did the poor schmucks who wanted rodent statuettes.
"I don't think there is anything else on this Earth that would turn a normally law abiding citizen into a criminal any faster then a desire for money. "
Revenge.
-Adam
If the item up for bid is that valuable, then why the heck don't they use Escrow? That way, you won't get ripped off. With scams, you can usually see it coming: if the seller is only selling cheap stuff (books, pens etc), then suddenly lists an expensive item - that's got to be suspicious, right? OTOH, ebay doesn't help, by wiping their records after 90 days. You should be able to view past transactions for a little bit longer.
No, the parent really had a good point. You usually can trust a large registered corporation, because they generally have good contact information and an image to keep up. Sometimes, however, large registered corporations *cough*Enron*cough* go bad. Perhaps a larger corporation is slightly easier to track down if it tries to pull a fast one, but it's not necessarily more trustworthy by nature. Say some employee at the escrow company is handling a $100,000 transaction for some rare artwork. There's not really that much stopping him from taking both, or sending the artwork and keeping the money - certainly no more than some guy with 6000 positive feedback points.
People trust their banks because of FDIC insurance. Before/During/Right after the Great Depression, this type of security did not exist, and (especially during/after) people did not trust their banks. There were many people who had their life savings in banks only to show up one day to be told that there was no way in hell they were ever getting any of that money ever again.
Yes! That guy!
So this will only get worse when an ebay merchant dies and the heirs realize that his 9000 positive feedback is worth a quick 20grand on the black market. What's to stop that? Or a merchant themselves realize they can get a little extra retirement juice by selling their account to the mob.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
Scenario 1: Even if he's dead, he had employees who should've been able to continue the business without him. He kept them out of the loop on these auctions, so they can't.
Scenario 2: His wife is his next of kin, and she doesn't know where he is (or so she claims).
Scenario 3: Again, his wife should know where he is, and if he just had to "step out" for a bit, his employees would be able to fulfill the orders if they were real.
If he had just disappeared, it would be one thing. But he apparently set this up with a lot of planning, so this isn't just an accident.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
You can get to the max bid by bidding up the minimum increment over and over.
Let's say somebody's max is $50 and the current is $20. The increment is $1. If you bid $21 it will say you have been outbid and the current bid is $22. When you get to $50 it will still tell you that you have been outbid because bids are first come, first serve but it will then say that the current bid is $50 and not $51. You know right them what the other person's maximum is.
Man, that's a pretty lame scam you're friend fell for. People who fall for things like that deserve what they get, IMO. Who in their right mind gives their CreditCard number to some anonymous nobody for a deposit???
I have no scam stories, and I suspect few people do. This wanker Stewart Richardson is an aberration, and to think otherwise is a disservice to the untold thousands of legitimate exchanges that take place on ebay every day.
I personally have done 40-odd transactions as both a buyer and a seller. I have made good money selling stuff I didn't need, and found great prices on hard to find items for myself. It's gotten to the point where, if I need to buy something, I check ebay first. And, I have not had a single bad experience.
I realize my good experiences do not diminish the loss felt by those whom this dork scammed, but I am not daunted by it and will continue to use ebay. Fraud is part of human life, unfortunately, in and out of ebay.
It sounds to me like eBay should implement a Web of Trust idea like GnuPG or Thawte. Everybody is associated with identities and those identities are trusted more or less depending on other people's evaluations of them. You'd also know who validated who so that there is more responsibility when it comes to saying, "This person is safe to deal with." The more effort it takes to build up your identity which is tied to some sort of official identification (gov't. issued ID, for example) the more likely you'll play right with that identity.
The feedback system is like a lame version of the web of trust idea.
I'd want eBay to keep track of trust levels depending on actual identification of some sort which people they already trust have validated in person (just like, for example, what Thawte does). And if someone ends up being a bad validator along the way, they get some of their validator power taken away.
This seems like it would at least be a step in the right direction. Maybe there are already auction/selling sites out there that do this. Anyone know of them? Unfortunately, eBay is the big-name company which gets more exposure, so it's hard (as a seller) to go to another site.
Actually, I hesitate to call these scams - but more on the level of "selling an article to a person that could be had cheaper somewhere else". Let me show you a perfect example:
Look up electric bicycle motor on Ebay. Now, I am going to pick an auction that doesn't "die" until the 28th so that others can see what I mean - I am picking the last one on that list - click here.
Now, look at that picture of the "dual motor" at the bottom - seems pretty cool, huh? Pretty professional, get a little kit and convert your bike to electric. Cost doesn't seem too bad (if you have priced EV bikes before) - heck, "Buy It Now" is only $1.00 over starting bid - so this motor combo, a cheap bike from WalMart or a garage sale, and a cheap gel-cel battery - and I can have my own electric bike for under $200.00!
The motor only cost $93.00...
Now - go here, and on the left hand side select Battlebot Parts - or click here to see them. Now, go down to the fourth item on that page - look familiar?
MECI sells the exact same thing for $40.00! Just above it is the battery you need (actually, you will need two of them for enough amps to go far enough - and really, this isn't the best motor system to use, but might be fun to play around with).
So, here is an example of an eBay seller using their own ignorance against them.
Unfortunately, this seems to be the "way" of our capitalistic society - middlemen, etc everywhere always scamming for a buck. You see this on Ebay a lot - cheesy CDs of "info found no where else" (yeah right, just everywhere on the internet) - these I would take more seriously if they were selling the CDs as "fruits of labor for scouring the Net" - at least then it could be seen as an internet information gathering service thing. You also see it in the multitude of "plans" showing how to build a 100" projection TV with a special lens (but, you do get the lens - nevermind the fact that plans are everywhere to do this, it uses nothing new, and the lens can be had cheaper at the local Walmart).
These guys aren't typically shut down because they do offer a real product, and actually sell it - and people love it!
Another "scam" - I have seen sellers of SDRAM bidding for memory on other auctions - sometimes within hours of their own auctions - for the same type of RAM - they buy the RAM cheap from another auction, then resell it the same day for a profit to other bidders (and typically, for much more money than they could find it for on Pricewatch).
Many times I have wondered if I could pull these same kind of "deals" off - and each time I stop thinking about it, because it just isn't in my "moral fabric" to rip people off - I would rather tell them where to get it cheaper.
I guess that is one reason why I will never own a business - I am too honest for my own "good"...
bleh.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Perhaps he meant this scam to generate more money than a quarter million? Maybe he was scared away by something and decided to cut his scheme short. Either way, once you commit the crime, even if you only make $1.00 or $1,000,000.00 you better start heading towards the airport.
My brother was ripped off I a similar situation. It only happened once.
eBay transactions are protected from fraud, all auctions are insured. My brother successfully got his money refunded by going through the process. Although a lenghty and time consuming process, it is worth it. I believe it took 3months to finalize, and the sellers account was NARU'ed.
As a general rule NEVER EVER buy something outside of ebay. If you lose an auction and the seller emails you and says something like "I have two would like the other one" say no, No deal is worth the risk! If you do buy something this way you are not protected.
Read the SafeHarbor rules. They have changed since my brothers problem. I believe PayPal has insurance for eBay auctions too
We have bought things ranging from Digital Camera's to Computers to Clothes to Furnature to Car's (yeah he bought a 1994 Pontiac Firebire). And only had the one problem.
On a side note I bought a bad Maxtor 7200 RPM 30gb Harddrive for $20, I returned it to Maxtor and got a brand new one. God Bless Maxtor's easy return policy!
101010b 2Ah 52o
250k will get you a long comfortable life in a country where the currency is worth a lot less than the US Dollar and average income is low. India or Mexico for instance. You can live the rest of your life quite comfortably in either place there. Toss an immigration official $5000 and *bang* you're a citizen.
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If you think this is happening, how about withdrawing your bid near the end so that the shill EBay account ends up having to buy the item?