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Profile of an eBay Scammer
prostoalex writes "FastCompany is running an article about Jay Nelson, whose primary income source for about 5 years included selling goods on eBay. Considering that he chose to skip the delivery, the profit margins were at an all time high. Under the names of biggerthanu, harddrives4sale, diamondsoft, yoshiinc and susancutey Nelson would collect five-digit PayPal payments from the buyers on eBay and Yahoo Auctions."
You obviously didn't bother to read the article.
It goes in depth on how he rated himself with multiple screen names and used various other techniques like buying inexpensive items from others with fake mailing addresses.
I love the image of the postal inspectors carrying guns. Reminds me of the accounting division of the FBI that walks into the accountants office strapped with a piece.
When I worked for an, um, "major online auction house" there was no call center, so there wouldn't be anyone to take your calls there at all. The resources just didn't exist in the company.
Everything was done by email and like most "customer service" and "technical support" these days, they have to send you canned responses several times before you'll get special attention paid to your case. Employees were rated on the number of email responses they sent every hour, not on the level of service they provided, so unless someone's problem is desperately easy (and thus quick) or someone is very angry, you won't get a personalized answer because it can affect paychecks for them to take the time to discuss things in detail with you.
Of interest: all contacts claiming to be official notice from customers' attorneys or official contacts from law enforcement personnel had to be instantly escalated and treated individually. Do with that tidbit what you will...
All other links on the page go to the valid eBay "help" and "contacts" pages. It looks really official, except for the non-professional grammar.
I wonder how many people fall for this type of scam every day?
It wasn't even sent to the special email address that I use exclusively for my eBay account (my first clue, woohoo!).
And yes, I've already reported it to eBay...
Wot sez we demonstrate the SlashDot Effect(TM) for the thieving bastard?
Here ya go:
http://cgi1.ebay.com/aw-cgi/ebayISAPI.dll?UPdate
You can't take the sky from me!
One of the interesting things I found about the article was the listing of some of his "usernames". I checked my ebay transactions a while back and found I had one with one of his accounts. I had received a broken proxim wireless modem. I mean broken -- it rattled, the case was cracked etc.
I looked at his feedback and checked on some of his older positive feedback transactions and found that the pay-pal link was identical to the one I had purchased from. I sent a mail to THAT user saying basically "You are [BLANK] I know this because the paypal links on both user's auctions point to the same account. How about you either refund my money or send me a working item and I let this go".
He said he was the BROTHER... blah. I think the idea of getting reported scared him enough that he sent out a WORKING modem.
Moral of the story: If it's an item that's going to cost you more than what you can comfortably lose, check the old feedback for anything suspicious -- like identical paypal links, a lot of 1 or 0 feedback bidders (shills), and even how LONG the account has existed. One month? Two? A few years? The longer an account has been around with a decent amount of feedback are USUALLY good indicators.
is apparently missing the single biggest change ebay made to prevent people like this guy from building up positive feedback:
they separated buying feedback from selling feedback. now to get +50 selling, you actually have to sell 50 items, not just buy a bunch of paperbacks and give a false address.
of course you can still get positive feedback selling cheap items but it'll take you a few days now instead of a few hours.
could ebay do more? probably. but at least they're not missing the obvious.
I got scammed out of $1,500 on ebay a couple months ago... I researched a bit on what my options where and filed complaints to paypal and ebay. Paypal found the seller guilty and was able to get me back a total of *50* dollars out of the $1,500.
:
It's amazing how difficult it is to get anything done about online fraud.
Anyways, in doing research, here is a very helpful site I found : http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/!turk
and don't ever order from these companies
http://www.factory101.com/
http://www.my1stop2gaming.com/
http://www.masonavenue.com/
Nice scam, mostly illegal, but again, if you nickel and dime a ton of people who are too embarrassed, too lazy, or just won't bother to complain, you'll get rich slowly (or not, I have no idea if this works for a long-term plan). This especially works for low-end items where you guess your clientele are not too bright or have enough resources or perseverance to complain, like emo/punk clothing, "Spring Break" videos, "How to Get Di$$$$counted $$$$oftware!" promotions, and so on.
I have heard, though, to never piss off Beanie Baby collectors... they can be mean and tenacious.
http://www.m-w.com says that the term goes back to 1877, but the first appearance in print of the word capitalism was in the novel The Newcomes, by William Makepeace Thackeray, 1854.
/.
I thought the Communist Manifesto may have preceeded that, so I quickly scanned it, and there are several references to Capital, and Capitalists, but no "Capitalism"
This site backs that up, showing what appears to be entries from the OED (which is a paid site, so no linky) for it and a few more 'isms'
BTW, here is an interesting article on Capitalism. I doubt that it will change the minds of any true believers, but I'd encourage all to read it.
Wait a minute, who am I kidding? This is
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!