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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...
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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.
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.
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"