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EBay Letting Fraud Slide?
joebagodonuts writes "MSNBC has an article charging that EBay's tough talk on fraud is just that. Talk." To a certain extent, I can understand the problem of having hundreds of thousands of auctions, and not being able to adequately police them - but ignoring fraud, when you have a policy stating otherwise is a Bad Thing.
This is hardly a surprise, one would think it obvious that the resources it would cost Ebay as a company to have to keep track of, let alone take action upon, the constant fraud cases would be immense. As long as a high enough percentage of trades are legitimate and involve satisfied customers, no legal organization is going to bother holding Ebay responsible.
I would have thought that reporting fraudulent users and such would be more the responsibility of the end users anyways, since its not much different than having people make purchases from someone at a flea market or something like that. You dont hold the owner of the building responsible if the "antique" you bought turned out to be a cheap knockoff.
Or do you? I'm not entirely sure of all american small courts laws.
Ice Cream has no bones.
I kinda thought ebay's whole attitude was Use An Escrow Agent If You Don't Want To Get Ripped Off. Now, if the escrow people are defrauding you, then that's a different story.
I have a bunch of stuff I'd like to sell, like a guitar and a mountain bike and a computer, but I'm not going to bother putting it on ebay because my rating is a big fat zero, and I doubt anyone will want to buy from an unknown quantity such as myself.
Ebay has a profit motive to have as many auctions as possible. They also make more money when the price gets higher. They don't make money when they have to investigate fraud claims, and kick power sellers off the system.
Let's put it another way: Let's say you're a power seller, and you sell a $1000 item. You give ebay their cut ($150 I think) and pocket $850. Ebay is happy, you're happy, the only one unhappy is the "little guy."
Where is ebay's motivation to change the system? Libertarians and free market economic darwinists, start flaming now.
I lose about $1000.00 per month on ebay due to copied software. I produce Video tutorials on CD, nerdmaker.com, and have to compete against $5.00 per CD copied software. After working with ebay for over 16 months, no changes have occured. Why would ebay want to change? They are, by a very wide margin, the number 1 auction site. Ebay makes money on a transaction weather its legal or not. The only motivation for change would be competition, and I don't see that happening soon.
To a certain extent, I can understand the problem of having hundreds of thousands of auctions...
This is a reasonable statement, and quite easy to agree with. (and yes, I know that Hemos went on to negate this phrase)
Don't.
It is unquestionably a massive and difficult undertaking to deal with fraud when you're operating on an eBay-like scale. It is also a primary purpose of their existence. eBay MUST deal with fraud at whatever cost (create a whole infrastructure for it if necessary--remember that only a few short years ago there existed no online auctions at all!), or they're simply not doing their job.
Not intended as a rant or finger-pointing here. I just don't want to see them get away with sliding if they're trying to.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Let's put this into perspective... There are thousands of power sellers yet only a few are mentioned in the article where the evidence strongly suggests...not conclusively finds fraud occurring. EBay is no different than the For Sale section in the newspaper. If I get ripped off by some guy selling his car in the newspaper, who am I gonna sue? The guy or the Daily News?
The only liability I see is the whole Power Seller rating system. This kind of implies that EBay deems this person a good seller and thus is promoting the seller above others.
Why isn't this looked upon the same way as an ISP and someone trafficking illegal material over the Internet?
explain to me what you were thinking when you didn't do this w/escrow? I will not pay for anything over $100 w/o escrow. It's worth the charges.
I purchased some Nakamichi cassette decks. Both were over $100 IIRC (the BX-300 especially). They went smoothly and I got the decks just fine.
What happened after I received them is another story...
sPh
More importantly, did you contact the 200 other people and ask them to send copies of their letters of complaint to one postmaster and one US district attorney? 200 * 500 = 100,000, which is way way into grand theft and RICO territory IMHO (non-lawyer's opinion).
No? You didn't? Why not?
sPh
Every so often, we put up some auctions for networking equipment. Lately there has been a trend of people bidding on Cisco auctions (see this article) and never paying.
One Ebay user bid a Cisco 3640 router I was selling up to $2550. This same user created his account two days prior, and was the high or winning bidder on over 80 auctions. Here's this user's Ebay winning bid history. Now, I'm not a mathematician, but this A-hole ruined over $64k of auctions. Sure, you can relist and file fraud reports, but what's to prevent someone else from doing this again and again? There's no accountability.
If they would require some type of user verification to buy and sell, wouldn't you think twice about fraud? Furthermore, why can't Ebay red-flag suspicious bidding patterns? I think everyone agrees that a new user probably will not bid on over 80 auctions worth over $64k in a couple of days.
Just my 2.47 yen.