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eBay Slammed Over Levels of Fraud
Dynamoo writes "The BBC is reporting that companies and law enforcement agencies are becoming increasing frustrated and concerned at the high amount of fraud at eBay. There are reports that it can take two months for eBay to pass details to fraud investigators, and that even for companies with a 'special relationship' with eBay it can take 5 days for fraudulent auctions to be shut down. From the article: 'With all the amount of profits that eBay makes, then there is ample scope for additional staff. Frankly, it is totally unsatisfactory.'"
Yes, it's ebay's responsibility to do something about this, but if you're making a big purchase it makes sense to pay a little more and use their escrow service. You should instantly be set on alert if the seller has a low feedback and it's an expensive item, or has never bought something etc. but noone does this. There's a certain level of responsibility to fall upon the consumer. That said, ebay aren't doing enough, but it's not ALL their fault
~HTP~ Hug that tux
Rember our friends priceritephoto.com? They are a full fledged eBay dealer. Though not as obvious as most other eBay scams, fraud companies like them are operating on eBay.
I should have added that I'm assuming matters like these will be handled better by Google. Or perhaps the seller will need to have a registered credit card with Google in order to place an auction.
I don't know, there has to be a better way to implement this that protects sellers.
By the way, there were Europeans involved in the court action against Mr. Hale (the convicted in my case) and they got all their money back too because there were people here in the states representing everyone.
I'm sorry to hear of your misfortune, I hope everything is resolved somehow for you. If you know anyone in Texas, now would be the time to ask them for a favor.
My work here is dung.
There are a number of fraudulent actions on eBay... but there are also quite a few scammers posing as buyers. A few ways to avoid them include:
* Do not be tempted to end the action early if they ask.
* Don't ship abroad - at least not to 'certain countries' in Africa.
* Don't accept moneyorders, WU, MG or the like - card is king, and PayPal (while evil) is also decent.
* Definitly don't accept a deal going like I'll send you a check on a higher amouth, you send me the item and the money left over. The check WILL be false.
* Educate yourself:
** www.scampatrol.org
** crime-online.info/blog
** www.fraudaid.com/index.htm
* Don't expect everyone online to be as honest and upright as yourself.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
They probably have a list of business practices like Google does. I'm pretty sure one of eBay's is "be evil."
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
I don't give a fuck how much karma I lose for this post and the fact that it'll be modded down as 'troll' or 'offtopic'. THERE IS ONLY ONE FUCKING O IN LOSE.
A lot of my friends and colleagues who know I've used ebay a lot have asked me if eBay is safe. I've had to be honest and say "no not really". You've got to be an expert user to spot some types of fraud and even after having done over 100 transactions, I still nearly fell for a scam quite recently after the seller had quite obviously gone to some lengths to fabricate a lot of feedback using many hijacked accounts.
On another day, my friend sent me the link of an auction and asked me to check it out for them. The seller had only ever been a buyer for several transactions, and then all of a sudden, the next 10 feedbacks were from sales to people with usernames ALL starting with "an". I'm not quite sure what was going on there, but I'm pretty sure the chances of that happening naturally are billions to one.
If you report these people to eBay they do NOTHING. They take days or weeks to respond, and in the meantime, you see that the auction ended in a sale to someone who obviously hasn't used eBay very much. They probably sent the money and got nothing back.
eBay is a FINANTIAL website. It should have an online-banking level of security. It should not be possible for any old script kiddie to hijack several accounts with weak passwords in one evening. It should be an SSL sign-in only site which never asks for your full password and forces you to use your mouse for part of the login process (to defy keyboard recorders and trojans). After all, a hijacked eBay account is just as good to a criminal as a hijacked bank account. The user/pass system just doesn't cut it.
eBay does not seem to CARE one bit about the level of security or fraud on their site.
I can tell you that I almost never bid on an item on eBay unless there's a way for the seller to receive the payment directly via American Express.
Two reasons here: first, the Amex merchant account is a tougher one to get. Not impossible to fool, and certainly not fraud-proof, but I've heard way too many instances of fly-by-night merchant account setups which take MC and Visa that disappear in 30 days. If the seller takes Amex directly, it's probably a legit business.
Second reason is that Amex seems to have the absolute best policy for disputing charges. Broken item? Use Amex product insurance. Never received/not as advertised/fradulent seller? Dispute the charge. Here's the thing: Amex is on the buyer's side! They want to keep the buyer as a customer, and they don't want to have to pay the seller if they don't have to!
Sadly, though, eBay is yet another case of Buyer Beware. If I were to go to a flea market or to some sidewalk sale, it'd be Buyer Beware there too. Not to excuse eBay for not doing their part to crack down on bad sellers, but as in life, your first line of defense is to be responsible for yourself.
The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin & Hobbes
I believe this depends on what exactly happened.
You use a credit card to fund your paypal account. As long as this was not fraudulent, the credit card company is under no obligation to cancel anything.
You then use your paypal account to pay for something, and that turns out to be fraudulent.
In this case, why should the credit card company be responsible? They acted in good faith.
In this parent post, however, paypal told the guy he was covered, when in fact he was not. This is fraudulent behavior on their part.. that's why he should cancel the original transaction with his card company.. because paypal acted fraudulently.
In a former life I was a delivery driver for a pizza store. Local mom & pop outfit. Of course, they had to accept credit cards for deliveries else even more of their customer base would dwindle towards the generic chains.
There was one particular gentleman who would order approximately $60 worth of food on average 3-4 times/week. Combinations of all sorts of appetizers, milkshakes, cigarettes, etc. and put it on his Visa. I was alerted to the fact that something was probably going to go wrong when I went to his appartment on one occasion, was led up the stairs by another resident to find Mr. Customer in his room with a joint hanging out of his mouth and a Sherrif's Notice (mandatory eviction) taped to the door.
Sure enough, bonehead contested every single Visa charge totalling somewhere in the neighborhood of $1000. Our requirement was to have 1) the imprint of the card and 2) the signature of the buyer. We had it on most of the transactions (something like 70%) but not on the remainder. In most cases the imprint was missing but the signature was present. So Visa, in their infinite wisdom, refused to permit the transactions that were incomplete on our part! Hell-oo? The guy's obviously committing fraud - you KNOW he's authorized $700 worth of transactions, the other $300 are for the same amount at the same time of night to the same address/phone number pair - do you THINK he could be LYING?
It took us charging him with fraud and several months of aggravating follow-up for Visa to smarten up and return the balance to the store's account. (Yes, as soon as fraud is claimed the store's account is auto-debited before notice is sent)
I'd be willing to bet that when he wasn't ordering from us, or at lunch time he was ordering from other restaurants and pulled the same scam on them. With the willingness of credit card companies to hand out $3-5k worth of credit to welfare recipients I'd bet he ate like a king for months before he was caught (and they probably still deny fault for the whole ordeal).
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
PayPal didn't do squat for me. I paid $150 for a networked power controller that turned out be a useless paperweight. The seller wouldn't respond, and a few days after the auction, his account was suspended. I thought "No problem, I'll notify PayPal"! PayPal made it perfectly clear that as long as the seller sent me something, ANYTHING, then as far as they were concerned, everything was just perfect.
And they are very careful *not* to do much about fraud.
Their position is that they are *just* a middleman that connects buyers to sellers. The rest is up to you. If you are defrauded, they want you to go to law enforcement, *not* to eBay.
They actively *do not* work to shut down fraudulent sellers or auctions, because to do so would be to assume liability, which is precisely what they don't want to do. So they are careful always to say "eBay is just a forum, we take no responsibility for what is posted here, that is up to you..." and to make clear to users that they are not liable for anything -- the veracity of any buyer or seller or deal is up to those that *use* eBay to research.
I think this position is a little weaker now that they also own PayPal, but back in the day they would claim to be just like classified ads or like cut-rate real-world auction and liquidations houses: buyer and seller beware, they're just the cheap man in the middle who holds no responsibility for either party.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Have you checked the fees? I did not overstate them.
Well, speaking for myself, when I sell one of my amplifiers in a fixed price listing for $85.00 plus $5.00 shipping, the insertion fee is $2.40 and the final value fee is $2.96. That's 6.3%. PayPal then charges $2.91 or 3.2%. That's not particularly outrageous. That's less than a 10% commission on the entire transaction.
And when I sell the amplifiers in a regular auction, the insertion fee drops to $0.60 - Ebay's take drops to 4.4%.
-h-
Same sort of thing happened to me when I tried to buy a PCMCIA TV tuner/capture card. The auction ended early in the morning and I was the winner at a price of around $50. The same seller had numerous other auctions for the same item, including several Buy-It-Now options at $75. I went ahead and paid using PayPal, since I'm a responsible ebayer, and was surprised several hours to receive a notice to let me know the item was no longer in stock, and it would be so long before they were that they were just going to refund my money - thanks for playing.
I replied and asked them to immediately cancel all of their other auctions for the same item and they replied and told me that they used an automated software system to handle their auctions and they couldn't cancel their auctions, but they assured me they wouldn't start any new auctions for that item until they were back in stock
That's been 6 months ago now, and they still list the same item for the same Buy-It-Now price and still start their auctions at ridiculously low prices like $0.99. To the best of my knowledge there hasn't been a day since then that you couldn't buy that item from them at their price.
I sent an e-mail to ebay about the lack-of-sale, and included all the previous correspondence, and asked them to please cancel all the auctions of that item by that seller and I received a generic "thanks for writing, we'll look into it" e-mail in response.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
You're absolutely correct. I only get positive feedback from about half the sellers unless I give them positive feedback. The whole feedback system is so flawed because ebay does nothing about the content of posts. Once I bought a item from a 0 seller (I know, bad idea but it was relatively cheap). The seller had about 10 items listed, I paid for mine, other buyers paid for theirs. It turns out that the seller goes on vacation without sending my item. 2 weeks I try emailing, telephoning, etc. It turns out that there are 2 women running the same ebay name, and they dont communicate with each other.
I was very disappointed by their poor service and unprofessional conduct, so I gave them bad feedback. What do I get in response? "user left wrong feedback" in my profile. It's explicitly against the rules to give vendetta feedback, but ebay just dropped my case without any notification from me that everything was ok.
In the end the problem is that to find a sellers bad side you have to dig through hundreds of butt-kissing positive comments (gotta get that + in return). In short nobody really does that. I can't look through hundreds of auctions and count tens of pages to determine if a particular auction is legit. I end up just looking for one I like and checking the top few feedbacks to make sure nobody has reported the seller as fraudulent in the past few days. Of course with ebay's lame dead sloth method of dealing with fraud, it could be 2 months before a negative feedback shows on a sellers account.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
he found a better deal the next day, or
it was a dummy account for a competitor, who was trying to tie up everyone elses 360 auctions, so they could sell their own, with less competition
------ Work is so much easier when you don't
I use AT&T's Universal MasterCard - there is a desktop utility that will create a one-time, amount-specific, custom expiration date credit card number with unique CV number. If I am buying a widget for $19.95 from Gary's Widgets and Wombats then I create a virtual credit card number unique to that transaction valid for $19.95 and the next 14 days only. American Express and (some) Visa cards have similar features.
Disposable credit card numbers are the way to go, if possible.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
It seemed fairly obvious that they would take the £250, and that would be the last I'd hear from them. It seems somewhat depressing that people actually fall for this kind of scam.
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