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eBay Fraud Vigilantes
firstadopter.com writes "New York Times (free registration needed) is reporting that users are sick of internet fraud on eBay. With lack of help from the company, they are taking the law into their own hands and closing down auctions they think are obvious scams."
About time somebody did something useful. Not like eBay has done anything. With problems like this running rampant over eBay, I wonder what kind of future the company has. Many users are already abandoning the service in favor of other means of purchase. I think people have realized that eBay, with scams, high shipping costs, and long waiting periods before getting a product, is often more expensive and less convenient than just purchasing the product at the store.
Every windows user is a sadomasochist.
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How are these scams? They are up front about what they are selling, information.
the advertising is a little misleading, but that can be said about any advertising for almost anything. when was the last time you ate a burger that looked as good as it did in the adverts (or saw a girl that looked like an advert girl for that matter)
This is more in the category of preying on the hopelessly gullible and exploiting their stupidity, rather than scam. Less like nigerian 419, more like religion.
Many forums have a link right on the post that allows reporting of improper material. Ebay could use this feature.
I've found questionable sales, usually someone asks me "Hey, look at the deal", but when I've looked for a way to report it. Zip nothing. They did not list any contact in safeharbour for this.
Hell, it took way too much time to find the link to report the phish emails I got last year.
Yes, it will mean more overhead, but that's what it's going to take if Ebay expects people to continue to use the site. Allowing a group of moderators that can flag obvious problems will help.
I hate to say it, but if you actually put your faith in such things as online auctions you shouldn't be suprised when you are scammed. I liken it to network administrators that run open relays because "we are behind corporate's network and firewalls", or the person that uses Outlook and wonders why he is infected with worms and viruses every month.
You're absolutely right. So they should have their items moved to a section dedicated to sales of information, not actual electronics, and label their auctions accordingly. If the information doesn't provide the user with the ability to get a cheap system like these listings claim, then I would submit that it is a scam.
the advertising is a little misleading, but that can be said about any advertising for almost anything.
Again, you have a good point. These listings, when you see the item titles and parts of the description, are very misleading.
when was the last time you ate a burger that looked as good as it did in the adverts (or saw a girl that looked like an advert girl for that matter)
I can't remember when I ate anything that was as good as the ads.
C:\>
its usually pretty easy to spot: only takes western union, item is new in box for absurdly low price, eithe rmultiple auctions or a "private auction". You used to tell by low feed back but its getting so that can be a misleader. You send them an e-mail and it gets answered during romanian daylight hours.
My favorite gambit is to ask them some absurd question that makes no sense like is this the power book that had the DVI fibrulator? They will answer "yes". Ask them if they take paypal and they dont answer.
I have to say that for all the problems and accusations about pay-pal, it is a hallmark of an honest seller.
E-bay claims a low fraud rate, but I think that is on a per-sale basis (most fruads dont result in sales, and there are many many honest auctions for $1.99 baseball cards, etc...). On a per dollar basis I'd bet it looks bad for e-bay. And certainly if you restrict the search to high vlaue commondity items i'd bet they average around fifty percent. E-bay needs to get sued and sued hard for knowing letting this go on.
Some lawyer should go get a job ther coverty, find out what they do internally to prevent this, then sue the shit out of them for negligence.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I'm still suprised that eBay lets this go on. Having things like this around where the whole purpose is to separate a sucker from his money implacts the reputation of the whole site.
There's a difference between stretching the truth and making statements that serve no purpose other than to mislead and confuse the consumers. Everyone knows that the burger they see on TV is going to be nicer than the one made by some stoned highschool kid working for minimum wage, but it's going to be essentially the same thing. If a 'real business' consistantly practiced the type of deception that these eBay guys are, they'd never be able to stay in business once word got out. Why is it different online?
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
No, they are still in the wrong because they are listing the auction under electronic systems, and they are giving it the title "Brand new PS2 never opened!" and when you read it it lists the features of a PS2 and has pictures of one, but if you read the fine print you see they are ACTUALLY selling a link to a website.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
By the way, this was just a joke, no need to make an entry of me in the CIA's secret files.
eBay could very easily design a "Click here if this looks bogus" button for registered users, and then place the auctions that are reported in a queue for moderator review, with additional trust given to those who have successfully reported violations in the past, and less value given to those who false report.
I've been buying and selling low-value items on eBay for some time with nothing but good results. It's fun.
The other day, I remembered an LP I found fascinating when I was a kid, called "Hearing is Believing." RCA put it out--I believe they gave it away for free--in the early fifties. It was an introduction to hi-fi. I suddenly "I'd get a kick out of hearing that again." I went on to eBay, there was a copy up for bid at a starting bid of $3.00, nobody else bid, I got it for $3.00 plus $3.50 shipping, and experienced a intense burst of pleasurable nostalgia at hearing it again.
Nobody can make a fortune scamming people $3 at a time, so most of the low-value weird junk items are legit. And if they aren't--so you're out a few dollars, who cares?
I won't say there are easy answers, but by far the largest number of horror stories seem to all be about one specific category: people that believe they can get new or practically new electronic gadgets for substantially below the new price. Indeed, no doubt you sometimes can, but that is the kind of item where the risk is high.
Of course, trading junk doesn't appeal to everyone, but I think it is one of eBay's highest and best uses.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Often times, these people who are auctioning "information" on how to acquire products for cheap are just banking on how lazy and stupid buyers are. Recently I was looking into buying the Zelda Collector's Disc for gamecube, since I purchased my cube too late to get it for free. Doing a quick google search for it, I found that I could get the disc as a free gift if I purhcased a one year subscription to Nintendo Power Magazine. It wasn't a bad deal, but I decided to see if E-Bay could do any better. Looking at the different auctions, I eventually came to one auction that had a price of $3.00 (where other auctions were going for more than $30. Looking at the auction, I saw that the guy was simply selling information on how to buy the game for $20 with no shipping and handling. It was insane to believe that he was getting money from people just to tell them to order Nintendo Power.
I sell Diablo 2 items on ebay. It's good money for very little work. Unfortunately, there's been a recent outbreak of fraud by users who buy items using stolen ebay accounts and pay with stolen paypal accounts. The items are virtual, so they recieve them almost instantly -- when the user reports their account stolen a few weeks later, the sellers have the payments retracted and get stuck with the bill.
These aren't just little kids trying to get items for free. There's a definate pattern here. People, who I imagine don't even play Diablo 2, have taken towards buying D2 items with stolen paypal accounts and on some legitimate account (which actually belongs to them) they resell the items. Thus they end up with money in their paypal accounts which is very cleverly laundered from stolen paypal accounts in a manner which is almost untracable. So all those people phising for paypal accounts have found a way to keep the money without having any sort of records connecting their money with the account they stole.
The only weakness of this plan is that, of course, is that the accoutn which does the actual reselling of the stolen items must be a real account. I have taken a couple hours of my time to track down the legitimate account of a person who ripped me off for roughly 150 dollars, and tried to bring this person to eBay's attention, but they don't care. After all, he's a seller generating seller fees for them -- they're not gonna do anything unless I somehow give them ironclad proof.
You would think would an overwhealming level of circumstancial evidence (he started selling the just a few hours after the first items were purchased using a stolen account, he sells the same items in the same quantities as were stolen by the two accounts I know to have been stolen by the same person, he even recieved his first seller feedback from one of the stolen accounts for his cheapest item) would be enough to convince ebay to even consider some sort of investigation. But they won't even respond to my emails anymore (and I'm a powerseller, supposed to be entitled to "priority support").
Let's face it, ebay is complicit in the fraud committed by these individuals. They do not act strongly to stop them. They do not actively monitor for fraud (if I can search completed listings and tell you who's a fraudulent buyer and who's not, then certainly ebay could).
So then it's not really suprising that ebay users would take to doing ebay's job for them -- someone has to do it. There's no real alternative to ebay at this point (yahoo auctions is a sad, sad shell of ebay) and people depend on ebay to make a living.
Heck, the thought of buying something from the legitimate account of the person who stole 150 dollars from me just so I could request the phone number from ebay and do a reverse look-up had crossed my mind. But even if I did get his home address, what would I do with it then? Show up on his doorstep with a baseball bat?
I'm at a loss for ideas. Now with all my auctions I'm forced to screen my buyers very carefully. Calling long distance to verify that the people using the ebay account are in fact the real users, checking bidding histories for suspicious patterns.
I want to treat my customers like customers, not like criminals. But I see no real alternative as long as eBay continues to drop the ball on halting fraud.
it's a pyramid scheme. They call it "a matrix"
Matrixwatch has a lot of info on how these scams work and are involved in bringing a lawsuit against one of the biggest operators.
They have instructions on how to report those annoying "free link!" auctions to ebay and how to get paypal to close the accounts of people who start new matrix sites.
There are a lot of people out there who are bad at maths and are unable to grasp that if they are the twentheth person to sign up for a plasma TV 50x matrix then they don't get their TV until 1000 people have join that list which will take years even if the matrix operator is not sued, shutdown by his card process and dosn't dissapear with the money or just not pay out when it's your turn.
If you are signing up for place 20 to get a TV the chances are that people 1-19 are non existant or shills.
Ebay is slow to remove "free link!" auctions but they are certainly monitoring for people offering to sell goods outside of ebay.
I doubt it a conincidence that transactions outside ebay reduce their income whereas matrix scams just annoy users.
I reccently bid for a computer. I got half a dozen email message sent via ebay saying "I have ten of those really cheap, email me!" followed by half a dozen warnings from "eBay Singapore customer support" (I'm nowhere near singapore) which began "We recently investigated the possibility that 'newoffretez@yahoo.com's account was compromised and used by an unauthorized third party. Our records indicate that you may have been contacted by this third party about purchasing an item off of the eBay site."
How does it smack of total unprofessionalism? NYT has the right to force users to register before viewing, it's the terms of use of their site. It would be unprofessional to officially support bypassing this mechanism.
While I don't agree to having to register prior to viewing an article, if slashdot openly supports bypassing the registration why shouldn't NYT block slashdot referrals?
"How hard is it to include them in the article summary? This smacks of total unprofessionalism."
So Slashdot should be more professional by disrespecting NYTimes wishes? It's their story, not Slashdot's.
"Derp de derp."
Ebay, Paypal, spam...all of it can be traced to the one inherwent flaw of the internet that, ironically, people continue to outspokenly defend: the anonymity of the net.
You cannot have a well-behaved global village without personal accountability for it's citizens.
I'm not suggesting anyone attempt this but I am curious if such a thing is possible.
I needed a textbook, Introduction to Electrodynamics, a book that costs $100. My entire family was making big noises about the high costs of textbooks and my roomate offered to buy it online for me. She's not the most technically literate but she has a credit card which gets her more ebay acess than me. She told me about half.com (an affiliate of ebay) and I gave her $50 and borrowed textbooks in the meantime.
At some point, she said that she suspected an ex-friend of hers had sent her a CD-R that she was suspecting of less than honest intentions and she was afraid it would cover her computer with computer viruses. I popped it in my linux box, poked around... and was surprised to find that it contained the solutions manual to my textbook!
I went back and looked at what she had bought. It was listed as "Introduction to Electrodynamics (Hardcover, 1998)" but under the notes it said "Notes: Solutions manual in CD format. Returns not accepted due to possibility of copying."
We've emailed half.com but haven't found any response. We've left bad feedback but that doesn't seem to do anything. All our requests for returning are unheeded.
I understand that he probably thinks (s)he's providing a valuable service offering bootleg copies of the solutions manual, but I found the damn offer misleading, and I don't even want the solutions manual! I want the book! And when no one responds to inquiries... Grr..
--Stanza, who has been burned internet shopping everytime I've ever tried to buy anything online.
I'm not surprised e-bay lets this go on. They are probably satisfied with their cut.
UNIX is truth, the Console is life. Use Evolution to send e-mail and not virii.