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eBay vs. Romania's Online Scammers
spinctrl links to an interesting story in the L.A. Times about the cloak-and-daggerism of fighting online scams in Romania, summing it up like this: "The country is the top source of auction site scams. One company is trying to do something about it, with increasing collaboration from local law enforcement over recent years. Ebay has sent over equipment and a team to help the authorities combat this form of cyber crime, which is run with all the organization of an industrial-scale business."
You'd think Nigeria would have a host of auction scammers.
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I ended up winning the auction at around $800 (IIRC). Most of these cameras were going on Ebay for around $900 for onces that were "refurbished" with half the parts missing and $1200 used in good condition. (Not bad considering I paid about $1700 for mine brand new).
At anyrate the auction was reported from someone in Oregon and they said they accepted paypal. After the auction I got instructions to send the money western union...to Romania. And this wasn't their bid pay service (or whatever they call it. I did use it once for a pair of goalie skates, worked out well).
That was a huge red flag (no pun intended) that something was wrong. A seller that was supposed to be in Oregan, said they accepted paypal, but wanted the money sent to Romania? The next day I got a message from Ebay saying the seller's account had been compromised and that the auction had been cancelled.
A couple days later I got a nasty message from the Romanian threatening to leave bad feedback. So they got the operation down to a science.
When dealing with online transactions you have to use common sense. No paypal or merchant/credit card service: no deal. I have one credit card, with a $750 limit, that I only use for online transactions. Anything goes funky, I report it, out $50 and cut up the card. (And I've had it happen once).
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
The article sort of looks like an Ebay ad. So, the billion dollar corporation has devoted one (whole) employee to fighting Romanian scammers and donated some pc's etc to the local police. Unless that one person is John Rambo, this is not enough. It is however enough for Ebay to claim "hey look, we 're doing something, when we don't even really have to".
From the horror stories I have heard from people around me about Paypal (owned by Ebay) scams and the indifference with which Paypal deals (or more accurately does not deal) with them, I know that Ebay is doing far less than it should, even when their own payment system is involved, and even when the scammers are here in the US. Deal with that first - it is so much easier - and stop BSing us about hunting down Western Union scammers in Romania...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
I am from Romania and I can assure you that the "supply of legal workplace" is very abundant here. If you are an IT guy you can easily find work for about 3 times the medium salary in Romania. I think most of the scams that are done from Romania are done by a small group of people which specialized in this. Not only eBay, but in Romania it is kind of a national sport to scam, starting with the political class and down to the beggars in the street.
The amazing thing is that in Romania, Russia, China, as well as other countries-- online fraud is a full-time business with real offices and employees and everything, just like your job but the mission statement of "the company" is to make money by devising and executing online fraud. They have R&D teams that come up with incredibly sophisticated attacks and they have teams to execute the existing plans, etc. The employees get vacation time, salary, benefits, everything. It's an actual real job, it's basically a wing of organized crime, not just some guy in a basement outsmarting the security folk at ebay. The local politicians are greased to look the other way and impede law enforcement, which is what makes it so difficult to shut them down. There are ISPs in Russia _known_ to be owned by the mob. It takes serious anti-fraud resources to combat these people.
I recall reading a few years ago that eBay was a source of something like 75% of all complaints about online fraud. Just yesterday I saw an item for sale by a guy with a positive rating of something like 24,000. Unless he's selling 6 items a day for the last 10 years, I see nothing has changed.
/rolls eyes...
Oh, you must mean the new ebay feature where they let you create your own random feedback number?
There are plenty of people/businesses on ebay that have legitimate high feedback numbers - a 24,000 isn't even "high" by most standards any more. I regularly buy small items like cell phone chargers, USB cables, etc. from vendors with hundreds of items for sale at any given time and a vast majority have very high feedback numbers.
Yes, there are plenty of scammers out there, but I'd be willing to bet that if you sat down and went through the stack of "ebay fraud" reports you would find that a significant portion fall into the:
"I was too busy to read the fine print in the auction and didn't realize that I would have to pay a high price for shipping & handling *and* be charged for insurance whether I want to pay for it or not!",
another large percentage will fall into the "I bought this item that was clearly labeled with 'As-Is' and it's broken and they won't refund my money",
and yet another percentage fall into the "The auction promised to send me 1 lb of un-searched rubies/emeralds/antique coins/etc. and all I got was a 1 lb bag of crap with no valuable rubies/emeralds/antique coins/etc.",
another small group will be of the "I paid for this item the day before Christmas and paid extra for overnight shipping, and now it's Christmas Day and where is my box? I was robbed!"
and so on, and then the last 35-45% of complaints actually work out to intentional scams where someone "sold" something and never delivered, or sold something like "X-Box 360 Box (with no contents)" or "BIG PICTURE of TELEVISION!" or something similar. I have no qualms about shopping on ebay, but I make it a point to check feedback numbers, length of membership, etc. and even if those numbers look good, I intentionally avoid any auction that is too good to be true, although that did end up with me missing out on a steal of a deal on a dual-core server that was listed with a starting bid of $0.99 and a Buy It Now of $0.99 instead of the $499.00 it was supposed to be...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
Same thing, except 'buyer' was in Indiana and the Shipping was to AZ.
I got a message about one of my auctions "Do you accept credit card, I wish to purchase all of your units."
I play along and within a few hours I get all the credit card info via e-mail:
"Here is my credit card information:
John Smith
--------
Crown Point, IN
(Cc#) (#Exp)
(#phone)
Please ship to Bob Jones
---
Phoenix, AZ"
The FIRST thing I did was look up the phone number sure enough, it belonged to John Smith. So I called him and let him know to cancel his card, it had been stolen. Left a voice message on both his cell and home phone.
I debated sending a cinder block via COD but I got lazy.
The only thing that did tick me off is I didn't even get a thank you from John. Nothing.
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I would also suggest a credit card company that lets you create 'virtual' credit cards. Citibank does so for every online transaction I set a $ amount limit and the card automatically expires the next month. The # is one time use only so if anyone tries to use it again or the merchant tries to charge more $, it gets denied.
If I buy a $23.43 widget from Widget Co, I create a new Card for $30, use it once. And then it's done. The only time I ever use my Real Number is in physical form.
What's really annoying about eBay is selling. When you buy from eBay, it's easy to know if you are going to get scammed (providing you use some common sense). A buyer from Jersey needs payment sent to India? I'm out. But selling is a whole other issue.
I had this one incident where I was selling something and the winning bidder looked pretty trustworthy; a few dozen positive feedbacks, a member for 2-3 years, from the States, the whole deal. So a few hours after the auction ends I get an email saying they needed the item shipped to India because they were visiting family and didn't want the item sent to an empty house. To the average, non-common sense using user, this might seem like a reasonable request but it's bullshit.
So I refused the deal, reported the account to eBay and the next day got an email saying the real account owner's account had been "compromised" and that they were looking into it. What really sucked is that it took 2 months to get a refund for the cost of putting up the auction (listing fees), and the final value fee from when the item sold. Since it was kind of an expensive item, and eBay already rapes it's users on fees, I was out something like $30 until it was finally refunded.
So again, buyers can avoid trouble with common sense, but wheres the protection for sellers? We can't tell off the bat when someone steals a legit user's account and then tries scamming us AFTER the fact.
I really hate eBay.
Somewhat off topic, but a roommate of mine who was into buying high end photo equipment on ebay, and had a friend who got ripped off in a big way.
He found some equipment he was interested in buying, bid on it, or "buy it now"'ed it. He contacted the seller for payment info, since the price was around $10,000. The seller was anxious to ship the stuff, and got his ship to address, so he could get it out. The seller contacted him sometime before payment was sent, but after he had the ship to address (which happened to be his home address.)
About a week later, his house was broken into, and all his existing high end photo equipment was stolen.
Of course, the timing could be coincidental, but it's interesting that the auction was cancelled in such a way, once the seller had the address of someone who's buying high end photo equipment...what are the chances the buyer has more high end equipment lying around?
not really... our gypsies (the ones that are not dirt poor) are rarely "high tech", they make their money by sending their children to beg and pick pockets, stealing cars abroad and selling them here, robbing and stealing from our Italian ans Spanish friends; some of them may be at the top of the scamming groups, organizing the business, or at the bottom, acting as decoys that receive the money (the decoys are the ones that usually get to serve time in jail).
Most of the ones collecting the stupidity tax from the US are actually Romanian kids, 13 to 20-22 years old; after the age of 18 many quit, because it's more risky (while they are minors the police can't do much to them, they aren't even allowed to beat the crap out of suspects nowadays), or get in the back, taking care of creating fake escrow sites, handling relations, etc...
The locals call them "hackers" because they use computers and do something bad, but they aren't really that computer literate (my brother had a classmate that needed someone else to start the computer and browser for him, and yet was highly successful in the scamming business), all they need is a web browser and a WYSIWYG html editor like Dreamweaver for creating their escrow sites.
Wrong, the problem is slowly solving itself, as things evolve: the first item a kid that made an assload of money buys is a fast car, and a lot have died in car accidents, some more went to jail for 1-2 years (and our prisons aren't pretty); also, money laundering is a lot harder due to our EU membership.
I have a good friend living in Romania. She's not a scammer, nor works for a scamming company, but because of Romania's label as a scamming country, internet usage can be very hard for her. For instance, Romanian credit cards are worthless on the Internet, even though she will pay for the goods she purchases.
I'm figuring things might get a smidge easier now that Romania is part of the EU. It would still be nice if she could validate in some way that she was a good customer, rather than a "Romanian customer"
The top seller on ebay actually has something crazy like nearly a million sales in 8 years. Feedback of like 688,507 I know cuz I bought something from him, it was a great purchase and customer service was awesome. Just cuz someone has what seems like an unrealistic transaction score or feedback doesn't mean sh!t, I have several friends that quit their jobs to exclusively sell crap on ebay (not fraudulently), one of em makes 6figs/year doing it!
Ebay is just THE place on the internet with the highest possibility of fraud, its like saying the used car lot on the wrong side of the tracks has the highest possibility of fraud, that doesn't mean you are going to get screwed for sure, or else that lot wouldn't exist long. It's the same thing with ebay, if the rate of fraud was really that high we would be hearing a LOT more about it than we are. Probably senate investigations into in and the whole shebang, and I'm not saying ebay is perfect either, but their customer service has always helped me out (although I've never been a victim of fraud, cuz I have at least half a brain).
So remember that cheese goes great with your whine.
Using car crashes as a solution is funny, but seriously now--I live in Romania and one thing I can testify for is that no sane person wants anything to do with the legal system here. I don't mean it's crazy with overuse like in the US; I mean it's corrupt to the gills. The side that shells out the most dough wins, period. A [successful] eBay scammer will have no problem paying his way out of a tight spot.
Where cybercrime is concerned the problem is compounded by the fact the Police is near computer-illiterate, a sad truth which also applies to a large part of the population; but I digress. Also consider corrupt politicians and officials who are just as computer-illiterate themselves and have no interest whatsoever in fighting something so abstract as computer crimes when they could spend the time stealing public money and fighting each other.
So it comes down that the only cyber-criminals ever punished are those who couldn't afford to pay the right people; it's a paradox of a corrupt system: the more you steal, the safer you are. Or, some exceedingly stupid individuals that manage to get the FBI involved and are made an example of as a token of ass-kissing from the pro-American local Government.
Romania made it into the EU as a buffer to the Russian zone, as a marketplace for the other EU countries and as a source of cheap labor. It has absolutely nothing else to offer that the EU didn't already have bigger and better.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer