Superdeal / Rushmore... This One Will Ice Your Cake...

Precisely...

"So did you offer this info to Liin's and/or this Washington DC reportere you refered to?";

Eyeonwall - Yes I did. He cared mostly about other documented law enforcement actions that may have taken place in the recent past rather than the evidence we have of his current activities. I'm quite sure I told him about the thread on the Aussie StampBoards that well documents a lot of his ebay shenanigans as well as non-online crimes. He is a convicted criminal who has served jail time in the past. That thread should be "must-read" for anyone who really wants to lean more about this guy. Unfortunately, many of the posts are difficult to follow, meandering in style, constructed in different color and different size type fonts, repeating posts, etc, so it is a challenging thread. But there is a gold mine of info there spread over a period of nearly three years, all in one thread. I would post a link, but I'm unsure of this board's policy about linking to another discussion board?

Bill, there was a link to the thread you mention in another thread on this Forum, but I don't remember where. I'm pretty sure that I've seen other links to the "Aussie" board, and I don't think any of them were deleted. The only rule I see about posting links is that they must be to family friendly sites and images (and you can't promote sales until you have 50 posts). I'm not trying to get you in trouble, but I'd like to peruse that thread again. For reasons you stated, I never made it all the way through the first time.

for Rustyc

http://www.stampboards.com/viewtopi...f=21&t=38353

I think this is the thread?

Yes, that is the thread that was posted earlier. I think the reason that these types of threads last and DON"T get shut down is that these sellers really don't want to give anyone reason to start investigating their practices. I really don't think Rushmore bargains wants to give ebay any reason to crawl into their doings.

Thank you,Hieronymus.

Yes, that is the thread. It is long and tedious and sometimes difficult to follow, but it's a gold mine of info about Mr Ryle/Ryall. Interested folks can also do their own Google searches of his name, also "Philip Aster". There is actually quite a bit of info online about him.

Please re-read thread, from the top.

Much of the discussion is about a UK cartel.

<SMILEY> Perhaps eyeonwall should emulate eyeonball. </SMILEY>

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

I think the poster's point was that if a UK cartel has a U.S. presence, it can be sued in the U.S.

Yes, but my unqualified guess is that an ebay account would not constitute a presence.

Q/ How would a court summons or subpoena be served in the US if the only (yes, if the only) presence is an ebay account?

You could ask a US court to enforce an UK court decision by attaching a US bank account, but even that is not a presence that would support a suit in a US court.

My broader points - costs ebay nothing to allow the situation to continue, costs them a fortune to try & stop it - remain.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Surely, TFIDPA (The Forum I Don't Post At) would allow someone who really cared to use judicious quoting to summarize the thread into a single post?

Hint: do it all by cut'n'paste to NotePad. That strips all of the coloring, fonting, formatting, the works.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

ikeyPikey, your point is well taken. I was assuming that "presence" meant more than merely maintaining an ebay account. Although if you could manage to locate and serve the guy in this country, the ebay account and the transactions with U.S. customers would almost certainly be enough to confer U.S. jurisdiction.

"Yes, but my unqualified guess is that an ebay account would not constitute a presence."

But they have an office and people in the US.

"But they have an office and people in the U.S.".

This is a good point In fact, I know for sure that SOME of their mailings originate in the U.S. The stamp that I bought from rushmore_bargains was mailed to me from Danbury/CT or Westchester/NY (it had both postmarks on the envelope dated the same day). So he obviously has someone in the U.S. Whether he has an actual "office" is debatable - just because he claims to have one doesn't make it so......

Its a 'virtual office'. He uses 're-mailing' services to make it appear that he ships from US locations. These are widely available on the web and allow you to set up what looks like a US address that you are doing business from. Typical example of this kind of service can be seen here
http://www.usamail1.com/business_solutions.php

This serves several purposes if you are a crook.

First, it allows you to work around ebay policy about 'item location' if you really are based in another country. You can make up listings that look, and assure the buyer, that they are doing business with someone who is on US soil.

Second, it keeps the sellers real physical address hidden to prevent being chased down by legal actions and law enforcement. If nothing else it adds one more insulating 'layer' to keeping others from finding out who you really are.

Third, if you are a seller who wants to maintain 40-50 accounts you can't have them all looking like they are the same seller. So he sets up new shipping locations for each of his seller's names to make the look like they are not really the same person.

Lastly, it helps with setting up bogus accounts on PayPal and ebay and by making it look like a different seller. You need to have a separate bank account, phone number, and physical address if you want to keep ebay/payPal from asking too many questions. The bank account is easy, you can use something like 'MagicJack' to spoof a phone number, and a service like the above makes it easy to spoof a physical address.