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FBI States Online Auction Fraud Biggest Source of Complaints
dipfan writes "The FBI says internet auction fraud was the biggest source of complaints last year, according to the annual report by the Internet Fraud Complaint Centre. The Nigerian bank scam still remains popular, even after all these years. Quote: "During 2001, Internet auction fraud was by far the most reported offense, comprising 42.8% of referred complaints .... Non-deliverable merchandise and payment comprise 20.3% of complaints, and credit and debit card fraud make up 9.4% of complaints."
The report is a 27 page PDF file while the Washington Post
wrote up an article about it." Just ask CowboyNeal about some of his fun with dealing with dealers in Hong Kong.
I have been messing around in the online auction business for several years now. I can say that you seriously have to do your homework on the person you are bying from.... look at their past ratings by other buyers... of course even with that you never know. Unfortunatly, sometimes you just get burned. It's happened to me a couple of times. Luckly with enough harassment and some "legal looking" documents sent to the seller I was able to clear it up. I know of others not as lucky.
Free cell phone tracking
Isn't there some way to work out a reliable escrow service that can act as a middleman for these types of transactions (if desired)?
Otherwise, I don't see a way that this could improve. There's scam artists out there. The Internet is the ultimate place for anonymity. Even a smart consumer could get tricked.
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
I really don't need to explain how shady that sounds, but one would think CowboyNeal would have learned, by now, that all those Chinese mail-order-bride scams were bound to catch up with him.
On the other hand, it's nice to see that "suckered into paying good money for Daikatana" rose to 8% on the FBI's compaint list this year.
Start messing with 'e,. You've got their name and address. (Generally speaking, most of them give you a valid address, just never send) ... so start ordering magazines to their address, and select "Bill Me Later."
Of course, it's a large amount of money you'll probably want to take legal recourse.
Now, on the other hand, I knew a guy who's business was not sending this that he sold on ebay.
Let me explain: First he'd steal high-tech componenets from the school, put them on ebay, sell them for a couple bucks, and then never send or answer his emails or whatever. He'd wait about a month, if they continues bitching, he'd go ahead and send the item, and claim it was originally sent to the wrong address, or whatever. If they simply stopped complaining, thwen he'd relist the item, and start the process over again....
Wow, can anybody believe this? I never would have guessed. My best bet would be that 22.4% of the auction complaints were legit, and 22.4% of the auction complaints were directly linked with Stuipd buyers.
Did I say Stuipd Buyers? Why Yes I Did.
Let me give you an example. Completely hypothetical, of course.
Say I were to sell something I no longer desire on Ebay. My goal is to get it out of my house, and recoup some of my investment. So I put it up for auction with a reasonable reserve. (This hypothetical item is a guitar that I haven't played in months)
Somebody new to good old EPay wins my auction. Horray. I now have in my possession my new ebay friend's guitar. I will release it in to his custody after I recieve my 177 plus 50 shipping, for a grand total of 227.00. (Shipping guitars is a joke)
A week goes by, the money order does not show up. My new ebay buddy informs me that he didn't budget his bills right, and can't afford the guitar now. He wants to back out of the auction, like I'm freaking Wal-Mart. He then understands that "Woah! I've entered in to a legally binding agreement, damn!". After informing my new ebay buddy of this fact, he agrees to send payment the next week.
Another week goes by. My Ebay buddy again emails me that he is fiscally irresponsible. He forgot to pay his car insurance for 3 months, and is about to get cut off. Go figure. I hope the insurance company cuts him off. He asks me if he can just cancel this whole transaction. I told him No, because I'm out my auction fees and I will have to file a complaint against him. He threatens, since he has my address (I'm in Iowa, he is in Hawaii), that he knows where he lives and what goes around comes around. After a polite email back to him, he agrees to send me a money order in 2 weeks and then add an additional $50 for my trouble.
Horray for me, but that doesn't begin to cover the time I've wasted on this transaction.
So I get the money on a Monday. The guitar gets packed and shipped out on a Tuesday, signature required. He gets the guitar this past Monday. On Tuesday I get a nice email threatening that because I did not put brand new strings on the guitar for him, that he is returning it. I informed him that I am not a Guitar Center and that he can't realistically expect to receive a like-new instrument for the price he paid on Ebay.
Nothing back from him yet, and I doubt that there will be. But I bet that you can add him to that 42.8% of complaints, if he can figure out how to dial a phone.
I give up on ebay. Dealing with idiots is not worth the $$$.
-S
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
I thought he was only a voting option :)
Seriously, I'm not surprised about the online fraud that we read once and a while. If you see people paying more on ebay for a used item (i.e. digital camera) than they would pay for a new one, it gives just a small hint on the IQ of some people.
I'm not in sociology, but one thing is for sure, if people are misinformed about the price of the stuff they buy (and it's a lot of them), being naive and not doublechecking someone with 0 feedback or negative complaints sure won't help the cause. It's like leaving your porsche's doors unlocked on a street.
Okay there are also those who got scammed by people with 6000 points like reported on slashdot a few weeks ago, but those are exeptions and you'd get more chances being ripped off with a used car dealer than this if you do everything that ebay recommend you to do.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Why is this news? "Oh, gee, you mean this person I'm trying to buy something from, whom I've never met before, have no idea what his real address, phone number, or even his name may be, might be trying to rip me off?" You know, if people were conducting this transaction over the phone, or by snailmail, everyone would say, "Well Duh" and laugh at the person's stupidity. But it's on the Internet, so suddenly it's a major catastrophe and the FBI has to step in and save us.
It's like all common sense flies out the window whenever any issue deals with the Internet in any way.
It hurts when I pee.
Only two problems with your pity.
First, the way the US is set up forces any interstate fraud issue onto the FBI. Your local police can handle intra-state complaints, but they have no jurisdiction once a problem crosses the state line. They can forward the complaint to the other state, but as a practical matter it will get bumped to the national agency with jurisdiction - the FBI.
Second, we don't know that these are all small scams. A lot of scam artists have learned to keep each individual scam small (<$500, say) to avoid triggering local attention. It's only when you realize that it's a group working together that have scammed thousands of people that you discover this "small complaint" is actually part of a multi-million dollar fraud ring. And that is definitely large enough for the FBI's attention.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
The beauty of this is that if your generated number gets "stolen" by an unscrupulous dealer, you don't need to worry about it because the number will be almost useless!
I'm honestly surprised that these services aren't advertised more widely, because they're probably one of the best ways to protect yourself against credit card fraud when dealing with unknown and far-away merchants. I know that American Express and MBNA cards have this capability, and I've heard rumors that Discover can do the same thing.
In the US internet purchases are taxed, so is mail order.
The fact that you don't report it just makes you a violater of tax code, and people like you will probably force some kind of immediate taxation which will raise the base cost of goods.
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