Slashdot Mirror
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."
I'm not saying this guy didn't steal a tremendous amount of money, but I'm shocked he was able to perpetuate such an series of thefts. Isn't this the purpose of the eBay rating systems, etc.?
"Stumble before you crawl"
Considering all the horror stories I've read on paypalsucks.com, this story somehow isn't as shocking as it should be. How is it that people like this continue to operate, when legitimate merchants are getting screwed out of their cash?
Over the past few months, I've been trying to clean out my Cupboard of Random Tech to sell some old mobile phones, a couple of laptops, and some miscellaneous techy things.
Usually I have to re-list an item 3 or 4 times before it sells, because people will bid, win, and then simply disappear off the face of the Earth.
Also, the number of e-mails I get asking if I can ship to some obscure country where credit card fraud is thriving is very high.
eBay needs to find some way of beating the scammers to survive.
If they treat law enforcement as a "customer", then law inforcement must have a lot of unreturned emails and automated replies.
I challenge anyone to find a conspicous mention anywhere on the EBay site where you can phone and talk to someone about someone defrauding you money.
I've lost over $200 on EBay and have all the evidence in the world but EBay will not do anything about it or even acknowledge the problem by sending a human-generated response.
I bought a few DIMMs for one of my SparcStations. A week or so passed with no items. I contacted the seller and he gave me the date that the item was shipped. A few days later I got a sticker on the door saying my item was at the post office. I went there and they said someone filled out the wrong form. They meant to send me a form saying my item could not be located. I went back and forth with the seller with him supposedly going to his post office and complaining. Still not knowing if it was ever going to come. About 2 months later the packaged arrived with the original shipping postmark. Pretty good for "Priority" mail.
I like how the Postal inspector (Higgins) is trying to make this out into an epic battle between a criminal mastermind, and himself, a master-sleuth.
Higgins had been on eBay once or twice, but he'd never bought or sold anything on the site. Working the Nelson case was "a fast learning process," he says. "It was like skipping 101 and going right to the master class."
The perps ID lead straight to his home address. No PO box, no nothing.
This is an example of how long some dumb punk can get away with a pretty simple fraud, not an example of investigatory brilliance. Hell, the guy had already been visited once before by a postal inspector.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
how easy is it to have multiple logins and create a "false reputation" for yourself as a seller?
you can have an ebay id for every email address you have. however, the biggest scam currently on ebay involves stealing other people's good reputations by gaining access to their account and then posting high dollar auctions - laptops, digital cameras, etc. a huge majority of these will ask for payment via western union to a foreign nation. people who are only checking feedback are continually scammed by these people.
your best protection (as a buyer) is to pay for any auction with a credit card via paypal. ask your seller a question before you bid. their answer will help reveal if they are the kind of person you want to deal with. check their history. did they sell 100 widgets for $1 and then suddenly list a plasma tv?
i would also suggest any buyer check out the trust and safety forum in the community section. a quick read of the latest messages will alert you to the current scams and help you avoid them.
In 97 or so, there was a scammer on EBay who was fleecing the Japanese sword collector community. He knew something about swords, and had done some real deals, but then started ripping people off - both not sending things and cashing money orders (this was before paypal/etc), and offering to repair/polish blades, taking the swords, and not sending them back. He was in the midwest at the time. People started to figure it out, and got together. He made the big mistake of ripping off a Deputy elsewhere in the midwest as well.
He switched screen names and moved out of the town he lived in. He started scamming again under the new name, and I both identified him by his use of his real name to sign an email, and I proved he was using an image from someone else's website as the sword he was selling. We arranged for one of us (using a new screenname) to be the high bidder (the Deputy from KS). This gave us an address (Mailboxes/etc I think) in the northwest. He was arrested and forced to return about a dozen swords (and money I think), and I think was given a suspended sentence. He'd probably scammed on the order of $20-40K or more; one of the bigger ones at the time.
Note: while I helped track him down, I was lucky and wasn't taken by him, so after he was caught I only heard a few random details.
Every kind of society had/has its share of shirkers; this problem is not particular to western or capitalist societies.
What is particular for our type of society (and some other types) is that it wants its members to be succesful. The 'ideal' thing in our society is to do well in school, get a good job, get a nice raise and promotions from time to time, marry, buy a house and a good car, and live the good live. Those who do not attain this ideal may feel left out... in fact, their peers may start wondering about them. And this feeling may drive some people to turn to crime or unethical behaviour in order to attain the ideal... others may sit and moan about society being unfair.
I've spent some time in the Dutch Caribbean, where no-one gives a toss about how much you make, how your career is progressing or what kind of car you drive. I must say it's been refreshing to live in a society where there is no constant pressure to perform. Then again, very few people there feel the need to perform, and thus not much gets done. The real question of course is: who lives the better (ie. more enjoyable) lifestyle? Us or them?
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
In my experience as a long time sellar on eBay, since 1996, there are certain categories which attract "scum." Computer hardware/software, video games, jewelry/watches, toys (especially Transformers) and worst of all consumer electronics.
When I do get a non-paying bidder, I follow the eBay guidelines, eventually get a refund on my fees and relist the item. I require the buyer pay postal insurance on all items over $ 20 to guard against the "item never arrived" excuse.
As I see it eBay has no incentive for guarding against non-paying bidder fraud. Most sellers won't complain so eBay makes double when the item is relisted.
Okay, I buy computer parts and electronics and such on ebay from time to time. Generally $20-$200 items. It's usually a good deal. I've never had a bad experience, though I've passed up many a good deal from a seller with insufficient feedback.
This is what I do:
(1) check out seller's feedback, make sure they've sold similar things before. If they have less than ~50 positive feedback and any legit negative feedback, I don't bid.
(2) ask seller a question about the item, something so they'll have to put a minute or two of thought into it and actually LOOK at the item.
(3) if they respond in a timely manner, I can be fairly sure they actually have the item.
(4) go ahead and make a SINGLE BID for the item
My bicyles
True story:
I bought a video adapter for $16 on Ebay a few weeks ago. I didn't pay insurance, and the guy claimed it was lost in the mail. A scam, you say? Judging from his zipcode, my zipcode, and the date, it was actually quite plausible: a truck carrying mail from his area to mine got into an accident and the mail was destroyed. It was in NC and featured in the local newspapers, but sadly I can't find a link at the moment.
In the end, he refunded my money, even shipping. yay!
Excellent Ebayer. Would do business with again. A+++++++
The man most often credited with "founding" socialism was Robert Owen. A Google search will bring up websites about what he believed, what he was trying to do, and how he did it. In essence, Owen ran textile mills, felt that his industry was dealing with the people doing the work poorly, and proposed ways in which his business could be restructured to give his workers and their families a decent life. Despite Modern American (including Hessen's) dogmatic portrayal of socialists and socialism, Owen didn't involve the State in anything beyond one attempt to outlaw child labour.
Omitting this might seem just carelessness, but actually Hessen chooses to write about that very period in history, describing the period as being some sort of war between evil Socialists who were trying to eradicate "individualism" and the mill owners who could do no bad because, well, things weren't actually worse were they:
While it's true that Socialists like Owen promoted brotherhood, community, and social solidarity, and even designed model utopias which had a few common areas (erm, basically, kitchens and schools, and these "utopias" were, for the most part, intended to be supplied by employers like Owen for their workers, in order to be more humane), to suggest, as Hessen does, that these were repudiations of what had become known as capitalism, and were promotions of coerced, governmental, involvement and a destruction of inelienable rights, is an extraordinary jump. This is not to imply that there wouldn't have been those calling for government regulation who were socialists, but the picture of a unified group opposed to trade and a free market, in favour of government regulations (at a time when, in Europe where this movement started, the governments were hardly seen as friends of the poor - the poor couldn't even vote in the UK, you had to be a male landowner to do that) is an absurd one. It is even more absurd when he adds comments about inalienable rights, especially given socialists were, by and large, trying to improve rights for everyone rather than allow a situation where by economic circumstance, their's or those of their parents, someone may be deprived unfairly of any degree of reasonable control over their lives.This kind of slap-dash rewriting of history is why it's very often difficult to take the ideological Right seriously. Simplistic paintings of "socialism", over-zealous faith in the "free market" to solve every problem, and a refusable to even accept the possibility that people might need protection from some forms of greed, combine to shore up reasonable ideas with unreasonable justifications.
Unfortunately, since Reagan and Thatcher made these ideas fashionable, these views are taken far more seriously than they should be.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.