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An Inside Look at eBay Security
daria42 writes "This in-depth interview with eBay's Australia/New Zealand security manager is fascinating reading for anyone interested in online security and how the online auctioneer interacts with law enforcement agencies. "Normal people don't get up in the morning and wonder how they can steal or trick someone. I won't rest until we can eliminate wrongdoing," says eBay''s Alastair MacGibbon."
All that I got out of this article is that they have a phishing toolbar, an email address to test spoofs on, and that they are "committed" to a bunch of crap. This is not an in-depth look at anything.
Sample "in-depth" response for those who didn't RTFA:
I read the article.
:)
I've never seen a more PR-fluff article in my life.
(Okay, that was an exaggeration. I follow the SCO saga as much as the next guy
"Normal people don't get up in the morning and wonder how they can steal or trick someone."
That's amazing that this guy can define a "normal" person since psychiatrisys and psychologists have been trying to do this for many, many years. I happen to disagree with him, in fact.
There's been numerous stories about the security aspects of browsers. Would you recommend Internet Explorer or other browsers such as Firefox and Opera for eBay members?
MacGibbon: eBay does not endorse any particular browser.
Is Linux really more secure than Windows?
MacGibbon: eBay does not endorse any particular platform.
Then he really will not be able to get sleep, promoting a browser with some anti phishing techniques in it would help his job, and people listen to him based on his role.
On the other hand, I understand his reasoning behind the remarks: If you promote something, and it still goes wrong, people will try to blame it on you.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
An Inside Listen to eBay Security:
"Hellloooooooooo.....!"
"llloooooooooo.....!"
"lloooooooo.....!"
"loooooo....."
"oooooo...."
"oo....."
On reading this it seems eBay haven't got a blue. Basically the whole thing can be summed up by saying:
:(
1) We work closely with law enforcement agencies
2) Less than 1/100th of 1% of cases are fraud
No new information. No techniques the rest of us can use to prevent on-line crime. No reason to read it
Reading the summary (and knowing what we know about e-bay), I can't help but think of it being said Professor Farnsworth:
.... zzzzzz.
"I won't rest, until we can..." *snore*
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Normal people don't get up in the morning and wonder how they can steal or trick someone.
I agree. It would definitely be an odd person that got up in the morning and wondered "Hmm... how can I steal someone today?"
hayalci
Q: How much (in dollar terms) and how many subscribers have made claims to eBay's buyer protection program?
A: I cannot put a dollar amount on this figure.
Q: How does eBay weed out unscrupulous sellers on your site?
A: We have zero tolerance for wrongdoing and are committed to making eBay as safe as possible for our members.
Q: Is Linux really more secure than Windows?
A: eBay does not endorse any particular platform.
And so on.
"I won't rest until we can eliminate wrongdoing," They'd best eliminate paypal (which they own) first then, if they're talking about wrongdoings. http://www.paypalsucks.com/ for the few who don't know about it. Taking the easy road out and getting money from the person they know is in the right just because it's easier then getting it form the scammer is the name of the game with Ebay and their wholely owned paypal.
If you have a Paypal account and regularly use it, I advise you to reread the user agreement and make sure you agree with the terms. Always protect yourself as nobody else will.
To the guy thats following up the Robin Williams film "Bicentenial Man" as "Bicentenial Man 2"
"Normal people don't get up in the morning and wonder how they can steal or trick someone. I won't rest until we can eliminate wrongdoing," says eBay''s Alastair MacGibbon."
"Sweet llamas of the Bahamas !"
"I won't rest until we can eliminate wrongdoing,"
Someone give this guy a lightsaber...
(Or a gun and a map to an Al-Quaida training camp)
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
Since when does a collection of non-commital answers to vague questions qualify as an 'in-depth interview'.
And since when has slashdot stopped letting lynx users post comments!! Captcha's discriminate against me and my shell session.
In depth? Hardly. It was looking like a reasonable interview until the second question: Do you think these victims are shooting the messenger -- ie eBay -- instead of heeding the numerous warnings about payment procedures and security? The question is good but the answer is just market spiel that doesn't actually answer what was asked.
Percentage this, eBay is striving hard to do that...
I won't rest until we can eliminate wrongdoing.
My god, he's the "Trust and Safety Director" at eBay, not a homicide detective(!)
Q: eBay's Fraud Investigations Team -- does every country eBay operates in have one?
MacGibbon: There are over 1,000 Trust and Safety employees at eBay and PayPal operating in the 32 markets around the world.
I figure that means "No".
Somebody seems to have emailed in some questions and PR pasted in some answers. I do however now know that there are 1,000 Trust and Safety employees at eBay and PayPal.
Oh and eBay thinks crime is like really and totally bad and stuff - my world is still rocking from the news.
Q: Is Linux really more secure than Windows? A: MacGibbon: eBay does not endorse any particular platform. ''
Q: Should children eat pellets of rat poison, or should they eat a healthy balanced diet?
A: eBay does not give advice on nutrition.
Q: Should I vacation in the Sunni Triangle, or in Cancun?
A: eBay does not give vacation advice.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Yes. That confirms it: he thinks he's Batman.
or did this article basically provide NO information at all on how they track down these people and then hand them over to the police?
i was hoping for SOME information, not just marketing talk
"I won't rest until we can eliminate wrongdoing," says eBay's Alastair MacGibbon.
That's going to be one tired fella. I think I just heard the price of coffee, Mountain Dew, and Jolt cola going up slightly in his locale.
And they said zombies weren't real!
What a great advertisement. It took me a few sentences to actually realize that I was viewing an online commercial. The slick placement as a /. news article was what almost got me at first!
Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this: that you are dreadfully like other people. - James Russell Lowell
When are they going to get all the Asian bootlegs off there? It is nearly impossible to shop for video games on there because they flood the site with listings. Same for DVDs.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
I was recently looking to purchase a VHS tape of a classic TV show off eBay. I know this one exists as a regular commercial release, and I wanted to buy the legit copy. I found a certain seller listing it, and was poised to bid until I looked at his feedback.
In the feedback, I found several negative feedback complaints that the seller shipped the buyer a crappy tape taped off of TV. The vague wording in the listing I was interested in (and lack of an image) implied that this, too, was just a copy off of TV. I asked him him if the tape was legit, but got no response.
After this, I would look for this episode, and always find the guy selling his pirated copies. His negative feedback which mentioned the copies being pirated grew. I reported him to eBay a few times. They did nothing. At one time, they said they had no policy against anyone taping commercial shows off TV and selling them.
Where were you when the voynix came?
If it's eBay's goal to 'wipe out wrongdoing', then why don't they even enforce their own policies? Title spamming on eBay runs contrary to policy, yet is so rampant as to make many searches useless.
Of all the simple things eBay could do to clean up the end-user experience, building a crawling engine to sniff out and flag this kind of nonsense might be among the most trivial. But yet, nothing is done about it.
But of course.. it's a simple fact that eBay benefits any time a sale occurs. If title spamming increases the rate of sales, and possibly the final bid price, it's actually in eBay's financial interest to turn a blind eye. In the end, eBay is a for-profit corporation, with a primary duty to line the pockets of the execs and shareholders.
Just something to consider, next time you ask yoursef "Why the hell don't they *do something* about this?".
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
writing in italics, so you know it's really me.
See the comment I just posted:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=157674&cid= 13213468"
Where were you when the voynix came?
The dreaded Slashdot Distortion Field has struck again! Seriously, this guy has been doing a nice PR work with this article, nothing more. Besides, do you really think he'd dish out details this easily? eBay want us to trust the site, not being aware of all the possible scams that lurk on it, so they'd rather not tell how it's done, but reassure us with a "I'm won't rest until these bastards are in prison" and "eBay is the safest place to do online business".
:)
Typical ZDnet article though
With regards to his previous job as Australia's invincible cyber-warrior:
Some have criticised the AHTCC because there haven't been any noticeable prosecutions to date. How come?
MacGibbon: These things take time. The way I would describe our investigative policy to date is that, in the last year since we opened the doors, we needed to know what the criminal environment was...#blah blah#
Well he gave that job (or it gave him) 18 months - either way I suspect the 15 year olds down under don't have much to fear from selling their imaginary plasma screens for a while longer.
MacGibbon: Wrongdoing upsets me. It did when I was in the Australian Federal Police for 15 years and upsets me still: normal people don't get up in the morning and wonder how they can steal or trick someone. I won't rest until we can eliminate wrongdoing.
Yep, this is one huge PR session for eBay and "how they're doing everything to bring down fraudulent activity". The statistic of 1/100 of 1% is bullshit too. I've been scammed twice with what I thought were legit bids - not receiving my product and unable to get a refund (thanks PayPal).
Though I understand they can't stop all fraudulent activity on eBay, how about just cutting to the chase and saying "well, we hope it doesn't happen, but let's face it - it just does and half the time we can't do shit about it".
I cancelled my PayPal account quite some time ago because their "fees" are rediculous. eBay seems to be able to "double dip" all activity and that's not considered a bad deal - charging to put up an ad, then PayPal (owned by eBay) charging a portion of the sale to handle the transaction (which does *not* guarantee the transaction is truly legit). I guess that's how they pay for their security/PR manager though...
Content Management System: A pretentious way of saying "text editor."
Y'know... I wish /. would display the link destination next to links in articles and not just comments -- would save me a lot of time.
ZDNet is most definitely not a news source -- nothing more than a PR organ imho.
One thing that you have to pay close attention to is the fact that the eBay buyer protection does not cover the first $25 of the loss. Some large number of items on eBay sell for less than $25, so eBay never has to cover for the fraud in those cases. But they have to make everybody feel secure so that they get more business.
My personal experience is that eBay does very little to stop the thieves. My girlfriend bought some collectables for about $26 (inc. shipping). The guy she bought from had a very good history, but about the time she sent her payment he decided to use all the money from quite a few auctions to go on a drug binge and didn't bother to send out the items. After a lot of correspondence and hassle eBay eventually banned the guy. A month later he was back on under his son-in-law's name trying to sell the same stuff he had failed to deliver the earlier time. The standard eBay response was that we had to wait for him to commit fraud under the new ID before they could do anything. Even though they had a name and address they didn't bother to do anything about her loss. Luckily she found a local police officer that took an interest in her case. He visited the guy's house and convinced him to refund the money. eBay never even reported the incident to the police... If she had relied on eBay she would have been completely out of luck.
When I get to page two the formating of the text just get overlaid and it's unreadable... thanks to firefox I was able to read it.. but uh that's pretty unacceptable from a major site like that when 90% of users uses IE...
"I won't rest until we can eliminate wrongdoing"
Sort of like how "we" (the US) won't rest until we eliminate terrorism?
Which will I believe in the future? A fluffy piece about how much eBay cares about security ("We weally weally do care about security! Trust us!") which gives me no solid information ("Our toolbar does such-and-such to protect our customer.", "We have X technologies to assist victims of fraud.")
OR
stories from my brother *in Australia* about how he was ripped off by an eBay scammer? Or stories from coworkers and friends that have been ripped off by an eBay scammer? Or the author of a national bestseller telling how he was eBay scammed? [1]
Here's a tip, eBay. Word of mouth goes a lot farther than a fluffy article that tells me nothing. I read a long time back a dissatisfied customer tells ~3x the number of people his experience than a satisfied customer.
I'm honked off because I had to sit through that article, feeling patronized and advertised. Sheesh. What a waste.
[1] _The Paradox Of Choice: Why More Is Less_
by Barry Schwartz ISBN:0060005696
(I think it was the first few paragraphs of chapter 7.)
Original Sin. Nuf said.
I have been using eBay sinc 1997 and being the paranoid sort, never had any problem.
Most ebay fraud involves chump change and law enforcement will not bother with it. It is like calling your local police and yelling: "My bicycle was stolen." You expect to ever get it back?
-- said Alastair MacGibbon as he donned his cape and dashed out the door for another day of crime fighting.
I thought it was just a phishing scam.
PayPal is a black mark against financial theives everywhere. My experience with them is about like this:
1) Realize purchased item is missing & seller not replying to email & contact number is bogus.
2) Report it to PayPal
3) Get canned response that you have to wait untill the getaway is made (3-4 weeks?) before you make the report.
4) Wait & re-make the report.
5) PayPal Sits on the investigation for two weeks.
6) PayPal Makes investigation
7) PayPal says: "The seller appears to be fradulent, but has withdrawn all funds from their account so we have no recourse: file a claim with your insurance."
If Ebay had any thought about fraud, they would start with PayPal. This is just PR fluff.
Consider the fight against regulating some types of Ebay Sellers (drop off points) like Pawnbrokers. Pawnbrokers are regulated so that their is a paper trail of who sold what (possibly hot) items. Some high crime areas have what are essentially Hot Item ebay resellers: They take items, and sell them on ebay. They then return ~66% to the "owner" who requested their services. Florida (god help me for using them as suggesting a good law) attempted to regulate this type of drop-off store, but was beaten down.
oh, yes. PayPal bad.
eBay's customer service sucks.
I tried to pay seller fees by money order, but I kept on getting directed to a page which said that this selling option wasn't available yet. A few emails to ebay told me that payment by money order was in fact possible, but I needed to send in some kind of payment slip which could be printed out from a page on the eBay web site. I was given a URL to find this page and yet again... I find the page which says that this payment method wasn't accepted yet!
I go back to customer support and after a few pregenerated messages telling me the same thing over and over again about printing the payment slip - I explain the situation and yet again, almost as if I was ignored compeltely, I am told that the payment slip page actually DOES exist, only that when I click on the page it most certainly doesn't.
I check other computers.... same thing about that payment slip page.
Then I complain to eBay that I don't have a credit card and I can't pay because they obviously don't have this payment slip page on their screen. My problem gets ignored again and I get the SAME cookie cuter response... that I can accees the page at a certain URL which I tried a billion times already WHICH DOESN'T #%$&ing EXIST!
Eventually while I try and sort this out. I send cash, which is rejected which the note that I send the money order form. When I ask how to send this, I am told to access the same non-working URL AGAIN and print the damn payment slip which I CANNOT FIND.
I, at this point, give up. If they really couldn't handle a money order they should have just said so and that way I would have saved time mesing about with them.
Eventually my seller fee grace period wears thin and I get kicked from eBay.
It couldn't have come sooner.
I don't know what it's like now, but I'm not going back to eBay.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
"I won't rest until we can eliminate wrongdoing," says eBay''s Alastair MacGibbon."
Who talks like that? I can imagine Batman or Judge Dredd coming out with some heroic gibberish, but the guy works for eBay. What is he going going to do? Wear his underwear on the outside and stomp out crime in time for tea?
"Normal people don't get up in the morning and wonder how they can steal or trick someone.", Normal people just get up in the morning and wonder ... how they can sell an item for a dollar (or 99 cents) on eBay and pile up S/H to very high dollar numbers and get away with it in broad daylight (I know! nights too) right in front of the eBay baboons! ...
... transferred to Riyadh.
Look at the following matters!:
1) "Get your free iPod/Macmini/flatscreen" _as long as you sign up to several monthly direct debits and become a spammer to get many more people to do likewise
2) Sellers with massive favourable credit histories accumulated by selling penny-cost items to a handful of people, all of whom have traded with each other similarly to amass a good score at no expense - and who then turn up with a batch of expensive consumer goods.
3) eBay customers that suddenly change location from the UK to Nigeria but are allowed to keep purchasing items..
4)lack of a report fraud button that works, for concerned visitors to report obvious criminal actions
5) Sudden spate of sales of middle-eastern antiques in recent months from people who can be shown by other intelligence (eg by googling an email address) to have been recently serving one of several Western armies in Iraq
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
that is funny. Mod story +5 Funny
me smells window dressing
"Normal people don't get up in the morning and wonder how they can steal or trick someone."
Right, they call it "portfolio management" or "marketing" instead, or use any other term for acceptable theft and trickery.
I've seen some - and worked in - a few perfectly legal businesses which had all the trappings of a scam operation, except that they weren't illegal.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
how can they check worldwide for stolen goods from house/buisness burglaries do they note serial numbers ? reciepts ?
eBay has become nothing more than a fence for stolen goods, perhaps their new strapline should be
eBay, feeding crack habits since 1996
Phishers Steal Trust From Ebay Sign In Pages
"Fraudsters have exploited a flaw in the eBay web site that allows them to orchestrate phishing attacks using eBay's own Sign In page. ... By including special parameters at the end of the URL, the fraudster has changed the behaviour of the Sign In page so that when a user successfully logs in, they will then be sent to the fraudster's phishing site via an open redirect hosted on servlet.ebay.com."
Because of the "borrowing" of ebay's web site, the EBay toolbar reports the phishing site as legit.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If they really wanted to eliminate the problem, which they dont really care about by all signs, then they would pay a bounty on fraud reports. They would establish some sort of trust network, simmilar to the feedback system, to cull the whiners from real fraud reports. Finally, they would require all sellers for new items over $100 to either post a 30 day bond with e-bay for cash/western-union payments, or conduct the transaction via VISA credit card. They would post an actual method of contacting pay-pal.
If tehy were serious, they would do some sort IP address localization, and post not only where the person said they were from but also where their IP says they are from.
If they were serious they would not allow first time sellers to use western-union on new items over $100.
If they were serious they would bar private auctions for first time sellers.
ergo, they are not serious
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Actually, eBay and other major online vendors DO care. Most people are shy and scared of putting the CC's on the net. With news popping up "all the time" with regards to identity theft, the commercials (i.e. IBM and AOL) with regards to identity theft (remember the cute, but air-head, blonde with the apple crumb cake?), these companies need to build immense amount of trust! Lets not forget about the "My brothers friends, cousins, sister had their CC numbers defrauded 10 years ago" stories.
W/o the trust of the people, eBay, Amazon, etc's business model goes out the window and they shut their doors.
They care about their security to protect their money by protecting *YOUR* money.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Short term only. Not trying to deal with such practices that degrade the customer experience (by, for example, making searches harder) makes it easier for competing services that figures out how to address those problems to establish themselves. Of course, barring a software or business methods patent, Ebay could simply re-implement the technique themselves.
The two fundamental reasons that Ebay doesn't deal with this are
-
No-one's figured out how to do so effectively yet.
- Once they do figure out how to, people will start gaming the new system.
It's an old problem.//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Since I have had neither an account with either nor have I ever had one with either in the past.
Most times when I forward whatever the form of trash I received [warning || threating || inquiring] about these <i>accounts</i> they are recognized as bogus. Nonetheless, a few times I have been informed they originated from eBay. Hence, some of the crooks reside within and/or the commitment to suppressing this thievery is not a universally shared goal at eBay.
I like the "less than of transactions are proven fraudulent". If you look at Ebay/Paypal's protection policies, it's not worth pursuing in most cases. With the combination of all the hoops to jump through and the limits on what Ebay will refund, you could earn more per hour at McDonalds. Meanwhile the fraudster has left you negative feedback just before switching to a new account.
If Ebay really cared, they'd make it easy to report fakes and frauds, and they'd set up software to triage the reports most likely to result in a real finding and real people would work on those.
We learned nothing here except that (a) There's hardly any fraud (b) the fraud that's there is not their fault (c) there's an ebay tool bar (d) This guy will keep coming to work as long as there are bad people and ebay pays him to look into it.
Oh, and they endorse no browser or platform.
Normal people don't get up in the morning and wonder how they can steal or trick someone.
What? They've obviously never bought or sold anything on eBay.
Would you like an inside look at EBay security? Just reply to this email with your EBay username, password, and SSN and we will send you a free booklet on how to protect your EBay username, password, and SSN
Ebay Security Team
Normal people don't get up in the morning and wonder how they can steal or trick someone.
This isn't sticking up for the criminal element, but normal people also don't get up daily thinking about how they're going to thwart the criminal element today.
It's that kind of pre-judgement which makes it hell for all of us legitimate consumers these days: Everyone assumes that you're a criminal, and it's up to you to prove otherwise. these days it's the opposite of the old viewpoint of "innocent till proven guilty".
Admittedly, this guy's going to have a different viewpoint since he deals with criminals on a daily basis, but to break it down as "blindly as "These people aren't normal" shows an incredible misinterpretation of people.
Yes, there are thiefs and criminals out there, but there are also people who make honest mistakes, and there are lots of people on ebay who just don't have the people skills neccesary to resolve disputes.
A stupid, non-informative puff piece. Just what I've come to expect from Slashdot.
i use debian, how does this effect me?
...have you noticed that they make it hard for you to pay by credit card - ie, they ask you if you're really sure and that you won't get "PayPal Protection" (sic)?
Every wondered why?
If you use your credit card and the transaction screws up, your CC company will reverse the transaction and PayPal are left to deal with the shit.
If you use your bank account, PayPal arbitrates - heavily in favor of the vendor (especially if a high volume $$ vendor).
Bear that in mind when making a transaction with an untrusted party...
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
...just this morning I got an email from their security department, telling me that they had detected someone with a "foreign IP address" attempting to log into my account! Of course, I immediately followed the link they sent me to confirm my identity. :-)
July 29, Netcraft (UK) -- Phishers steal trust from eBay sign in pages. Scammers have exploited a flaw in the eBay Website that allows them to orchestrate phishing attacks using eBay's own Sign In page. Registered users of eBay's popular online auction Website must sign in using a username and password in order to participate in bidding and listing of items. A new style of phishing attack shows scammers exploiting flaws on the Sign In page and on another ancilliary page which results in victims being redirected to the scammer's phishing site after they have logged in. This particular attack starts off like many others, by sending thousands of emails that instruct victims to update their eBay account details by visiting a URL. However, that is where the similarity ends, because the URL in this case actually takes the victim to the genuine eBay Sign In page, hosted on signin.ebay.com. By including special parameters at the end of the URL, the scammer has changed the behavior of the Sign In page so that when a user successfully logs in, they will then be sent to the scammer's phishing site via an open redirect hosted on servlet.ebay.com. Source: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/07/29/phish ers_steal_
trust_from_ebay_sign_in_pages.html
so your GF did all this for 26 $$ ?? unbelievable but one heck of a gf u got :) !!
Firefox over Internet Explorer.
"MacGibbon: eBay does not endorse any particular browser."
OK, strike that. Well at least he recommends Linux over Windows.
"MacGibbon: eBay does not endorse any particular platform."
Oh Well.
This article might be complete "fliuff", but I will say - eBay *does* at least occasionally take some proactive steps to reduce fraud.
Several months ago, my eBay account was hijacked by someone in another country. In under 24 hours after it happened, I received a phone call from someone in "eBay security" about my account, asking me to verify whether or not I was really selling a particular, expensive telephoto lens for a Canon 35mm camera and a couple other similar items. This was before I had even realized anything was amiss.
eBay immediately cancelled the fraudulent auctions, put my account on "inactive" status, sent me an email link to a special page that would let me confirm that I was the true account-holder, and then let me select a new password and reinstate it. (Good, because I was worried I'd lose all of my positive feedback and start over at 0 if I had to make a whole new account.)
Actually, at times, I wish they'd be less intrusive about cancelling auctions. As it stands now, they're quite strict on cancelling auctions for OEM versions of name-brand software, siding with the very questonable stance by companies like Microsoft that it's somehow "illegal" to resell even shrink-wrapped, unopened programs without bundling them with the PC they originally shipped with. (Nevermind the fact that you might only be selling it as replacement media for legal license-holders who had their original CDs/DVDs scratched or lost.)
I could wake up in the morning and decide that i want to orchestrate a five or ten thousand pound heist on ebay by selling different items in diff categories at same time and pretendint to be real when selling no existent items! The Fact is I DONT. Why? Because ive been ripped off by scammers so many times and ebay has done sweet FA to help! Im a man who works hard and honestly for every penney he gets and i know how it feels to be conned. in short i stopped using ebay, perhaps a total boycott will make them listen.
From the number of email's I get from ebay's security department telling me that they're having some sort of a problem and I ned to log on to confirm my account info...
I'd have to guess the security is pretty poor.
Particularly since once I do what the ask, somebody uses my account to buy 100 copies of goatse.
I've seen the same scam over and over where someone is selling for $9.99 a method to get any electronics equipment you want for free mixed in with other real items for auction.
The scammers have some way using javascript to keep you from selecting the auction ID easily and pasting it into the fraud report. They are obviously just trying to make it more difficult for people to report and Ebay also makes you jump through nested links to report fraud.
I have told Ebay each time that this what is going on yet I still see this scam. It seems obvious that they don't really care or are incompetent to fix this problem.
I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't insiders at ebay benefiting from this type of activity.
Anyway, that's why I wouldn't recommend using Ebay to anyone.
"Normal people don't get up in the morning and wonder how they can steal or trick someone." As a person who has been stolen 4 times in one week, I can feel for this guy.
Computer security is essentially authentication so that the computer does what it is supposed to do, but the rest of the business activities, fraught with peril as they may be, are not the responsibility of people in charge of security. Users have to follow the rule of buyer beware.
There are so many legal and policy matters, but auctions have been around for eons. The difficulty may be the sheer number of jurisdictions that eBay touches. This may bring about some uniformity in global law regarding certain paradigms of trade, particularly auctions.
Now how easy is it to use eBay as a fence? If the buyer is just looking for a steal, then the thief has a source of cash. However, a victim can also search eBay for lost belongings - perhaps eBay can be the last resort for the lost and found!
eBay is not just an anonymous cash transaction. A number of parties are involved, for shipping, payment, even the thief's ISP. A victim might request a trail for all items of type X sold. If theft is a big problem, all transactions of expensive items might be tracked with serial numbers.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
I can tell how hard Ebay is trying, and it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.
I can see their effort in every account confirmation email they send me.
I've been getting a few every week recently. Ebay has definately increased their efforts to keep my account valid.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
1/100th of 1% of the projected annual $4,410,000,000 is $441,000. Not bad...
Too bad the number refers to confirmed frauds, without any reference to claimed frauds and investigated frauds. Investigating 10 out of 10,000 is very different from investigating 70,000 out of 100,000.
Im sure they figured out that counting pennies is similar to counting fraud claims 1+1=2...(just that one can be a whole lot more exciting.)
A side note, I hope the google money rumors come true. If google raises the bar maybe ebay and paypal might be forced to cut some of the crap and leave the inefficiency by design in the 90s.
google paypal sucks (paypal is an ebay company) for some fun reading.
DUMMY
lets just hope he doesnt piss her off....
she may go after him.....
"I won't rest until we can eliminate wrongdoing," says eBay's Alastair MacGibbon.
+5 Funny
I shot the sheriff
dupes are better than this
"Normal people aren't ambidextrous aardvark afficionados either."
Hey, you better watch it, or the AAAAA (American Association Against Alliteration Abuse) will get you!
(Hey, it was either that, or an "insensitive clod" joke.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
It's nothing to do with eBay.
You buy through the eBay not off them.
Therefore it's your fault for being a dumbass -- peace nigga
I've worked peripherally with some people at eBay, and do hire good people, and obviously they have one of the largest "market caps" in reputation to protect. I was really hoping for a good technical piece on how they busted a multinational group of credit card theieves (which they did, just a few weeks ago) or a good story on the political struggle between the easy thing - denying there is a problem, and the equally dangerous problem of getting lost in the details.
What I got, was a couple paragraphs that read like some bank ad. This was dreck. C'mon, mods, this should not have made the headlines on slashdot.
when all you get when you send them scam emails is a form letter telling you that it is a scam email and how to retrieve your money if you lost anything from your PayPal account. I got that even when I worded it as so: '[all the usual identifying scam guff + note that the date given was 3 months in the future, and I don't have an account] so I know this is a scam email. I'm sending it to you because you claim you're commited to eradicating these'