How The Crooks Get Away With It.......

Uhhh....and how do you propose to do that, may I humbly ask? No wait. Even better. Why don't you write something you thonk would fly? You are (as I've told you before here.....) a very clever creator of interesting ideas expressed in a very original way. We NEED people like you!

I must be missing something on this one, sorry. I have bought things on ebay and have not been satisfied. I returned the things and got my money back. Pretty much a minor inconvenience. If I buy a stamp I am protected by the ebay guarantee, right? If I pay a lot of money for the stamp I can opt to have it checked by an expert committee to make sure it's legit and if it is not I can return it and get my money back. The same would apply to hidden faults and so on because those things would fall under the umbrella of not as described. To me it's not surprising that ebay doesn't want to spend a ton of money "policing" that side of things. In the end buyers are "protected".

This assumes the buyer knows he's been taken. Many buyers will buy collectibles, be they stamps or works of art or whatnot, and have no idea that they should even check for repairs or alterations or outright forgeries, etc. That's the problem here. There are sellers knowingly selling fraudulent material, which unsuspecting buyers purchase thinking that it's the real deal. They may go to their grave thinking it's the real deal, only finding out when they or an heir try to sell it.

Experts in the field are able to spot these fraudulent items, but there's basically no way for those experts to contact ebay to have the item removed. While ebay guarantees do offer some peace of mind to a buyer, I'd rather not have to deal with the hassle in the first place. 1 oz prevention = 1 lb of cure. ebay doesn't have to hire an army of experts to police things, but there should be a way for those experts to contact a real person to have the listing pulled or changed. The fact that ebay doesn't police it and has actively turned away volunteer help effectively means it's not being policed at all. Only when it becomes a big enough deal for the authorities to be involved does ebay even lift a finger, in most cases.

It's rare that Linn's runs an article about something negative. In general, this is OK, but I get the idea that they run negative articles only reluctantly because they want to portray the hobby in the best possible light. They probably also personally know most of the people in the hobby that they write about, so this probably also tempers any potential negativity as well. They want their magazine filled with stories about how great and exciting it is to collect stamps, not with stories about charlatans and how easy it can be to get taken by them.

Thank you for such an accurate post. One of the biggest problems we face in trying to do something about the fraud and non-policing on ebay, is getting folks to clearly understand what the problems are AND getting them to clearly see that ebay has turned a blind eye to them. Too many folks, like Columbian12 can't "see" the problem, as he clearly explains. This is why we harp on the subject, to try to educate everyone as to exactly what's going on. The more people who *DO* "get it", the better it will be.

Quoting from the first article linked, the one in the initial thread, "Once reported to the police, ebay and the police work in partnership to investigate the item and the seller."

The article is not perfectly clear in one aspect, that ebay itself does NOT report fraudulent auctions to the authorities. What they DO is what they are required to do by law, that is, they cooperate with the police during an investigation. In other words, they are not proactive but do the minimum that is required and then brag about it.

Years ago ebay published a list of the Top Ten fraud cases on ebay and how they were squashed, and in NONE of those cases did they take any initiative - and those were the worst of the worst.

As long as ebay believes that kicking a seller identity off ebay as an adequate deterrent, the frauds will continue, because the crime pays.

To give ebay credit, they did do something that ended a lot of the fraud, and they did it very quietly. In the past, a bad seller (in this example, say it was in the Stamps category) would "borrow" stamp images from online auctions, ebay itself, or wherever, and post fraudulent auctions using those images. The fraudsters would take the profits, deliver nothing, and abandon the ebay ID. But with ebay's buyer protection program, ebay would be stuck and have to make refunds. So they very quietly began to escrow the PayPal payments to new sellers until buyers were satisfied. Bad sellers might still try the same trick today, not knowing that it no longer works, but they don't do it more than once.

Fraud on ebay should be extremely EASY to prove because everything regarding the sale is documented and saved, real no-brainer cases. What's missing is effective prosecution when fraud is discovered. the ebay user agreement should include a statement that fraudulent sales on ebay are damaging to ebay's reputation and that the seller could be liable for those damages and subject to prosecution. If ebay is not willing to do that, the least they should do is send a cease-and-desist order to any fraudulent seller and then prosecute the seller if they try to return to fraudulent selling.

Some severe damage has been done in the Coins category, where bad Chinese sellers initially sold cheap knockoffs of US silver dollars and trade dollars, often in bulk, and usually on ebay, the big venue that knowingly allowed these blatantly illegal sales to the point that now, enriched by the profits, counterfeiters have expanded into a massive business. Their success has allowed the counterfeiters to now produce fakes that fool experts and sophisticated collectors, and to produce fake slabbed coins.

I watched this happen, made constant reports to ebay, warned them repeatedly of the threat to the hobby, and documented their almost total failure to act, to the point that personally I feel that ebay was such a willing participant that they could be prosecuted under the RICO Act, players in ongoing criminal activity for profit. After all, the RICO Act, originally deployed against racketeering gangsters, is used today even to prosecute some churches, and the Act automatically includes treble damages, designed to take away any profitablilty from such crimes. Counterfeiting and sales across state and foreign boundaries are also often triggers that invite RICO prosecutions.

In the Stamps category, ebay's ending of their very effective Community Watch program and the failure to replace it certainly does NOT indicate any interest in protecting their buyers, rather just the opposite, having already recognized the need and then making an obviously bad choice.

Their actions do not match their words.

I'm just saying...

-Dunc

Bill Weiss writes:




'very clever'? Check!

'interesting ideas'? Check!

'very original'? Check!

'write something'? Seriously?

I spoke incompletely: Point/CounterPoint was video entertainment.

If you could find a willing opponent, you could argue your points. Or ...

Since so many people on SCF seem to believe in (what I think of as a mostly mythical being that might be known as) The Innocent Novice Collector Who Spends Thousands on eBay, why don't you set up a camera, and argue with him?

You could demolish his feeble question-arguments ("but can't I just trust people?") with strident monologues; to refresh yourself on the technique, re-read The Fountainhead.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

TheArtfulHinger writes:




You can well extend this argument to most every other trade rag in most every other field of human endeavor, as well as to most every trade association in most every other field of human endeavor.

Is there an Exception That Proves The Rule? Perhaps the Journal of Forensic Accounting? Even then, the fraud would be by outsiders, not their membership.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

DuncanDoenitz writes:




You might bolster your argument by finding lots of cases where landlords were prosecuted for hosting drug dealers, or where car rental companies were prosecuted for what people did with/in their cars, or hotels - even short rate hotels - were prosecuted under RICO.

Good luck with that!

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

This is (mostly) off-topic, but this thread reminded me of a tangentially related situation that happened to me when selling a TV on ebay a few years ago. I had a brand new, unopened Sony TV that I won through my workplace. I didn't want/need it, so I sold it on ebay. For most electronics items, you just need to enter the barcode and ebay auto-populates all the specs and even has a stock photo you can use. Since it was very easy, I used ebay's stock photo. To my pleasant surprise, the TV sold within about an hour of me posting it. Not long after it sold, I got a notice from ebay that my listing was pulled by the copyright/trademark holder (Sony) because I used a copyrighted picture, namely ebay's stock photo. I thought it was odd, given that it was a stock photo, but the kicker is that since they pulled the listing completely, I didn't get charged any final value fees on it. The buyer had already paid via PayPal and I went ahead and shipped it.

I mention this because ebay DOES have a way for some non-eBay entities to pull listings. I would imagine that this is limited to manufacturers who have a vested interest in how their products are sold. I'm pretty sure they don't let Sony remove listings for Samsung products, for example, and I doubt they have any 3rd party individuals or groups empowered to directly remove listings. I'd also guess that those situations were forced upon ebay, either by the courts or the threat of courts.

"You might bolster your argument by finding lots of cases where landlords were prosecuted for hosting drug dealers, or where car rental companies were prosecuted for what people did with/in their cars, or hotels - even short rate hotels - were prosecuted under RICO."

I think you'd find that a property owner would be damaged, victimized by drug dealers using his property, driving down the rental values of his holdings, rather than realizing any extra profits. Unless, of course, he got a piece of the profits, as ebay does.

And vehicles can be seized, not exactly a desirable outcome for a rental agency. They at least require a client to have a drivers license, which is also proof of identity, and to buy insurance.

On a good day of Stamp fraud detection in the past, I've revealed sellers with over $20,000 in bids on bad auctions and got them shut down on ebay. But they were not always shut down. For example, I reported one seller who was using stamp images taken from another ebay seller's auctions, and the ebay rep told me they could not pull the auctions unless the owner of the images complained. However, I had already been in contact with the genuine seller, who was asking for my help because ebay wouldn't do anything after he reported it!

I did see where one lazy bad seller didn't even bother to SWIPE and host the images himself, but just used the link to valid images. The honest seller replaced those scans with another image saying "SCAM ALERT - THIS SELLER DOES OWN THE STAMPS, HE STOLE IMAGES FROM OTHER AUCTIONS!"

The "Cartel" has never suffered due to a shortage of victims, the only thing that slows them down is detection by collectors here and on other online sites. It is vital that ebay has to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

-Dunc

Oh my so much doom and gloom about ebay. There seems to be two camps of users here: those who troll its listings looking for "bad" items and those who troll its listings looking for good deals (I am in the second camp). I learned years ago not to "volunteer" my time patrolling a billion dollar corporation ( ebay is valued at $70 billion) looking for bad guys. It's quite obvious that ebay does not care about what's listed and finds it easiest (and probably more economically viable) to well protect buyers against any scam.

There will always be snake oil sellers - they've just gone digital.

I'm in the second camp as well, as I imagine most people are, even those who spend time looking for "bad" items. The real problem is that when a bad listing is spotted, there's no way to do anything about it and ebay just doesn't care.

When taken as a whole, the vast majority of ebay listings are legit and honest-to-God scam artists are few and far between. I expend zero energy worrying about them, myself. However, the scam artists that do exist can operate with virtual impunity, even when what they are doing is plain as day to knowledgeable people. Most people aren't asking ebay themselves to be the experts and police these things. However, I don't think it's asking too much that someone - as in a real, live person - at ebay take a look at bad listings when brought to their attention. Regardless of how many outright scammers there are, they shouldn't just have free reign to steal with impunity, which is what they have now.

Jenny2U:

Yes, two camps; but I think that the two camps are:

1) buyers (generally happy, and well-protected), and

2) sellers (who are trying to compete with liars & thieves).

Dunc:

You wrote "... they could be prosecuted under the RICO Act ..."

Why not just walk that back?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

To be accurate, I prefaced the reference to RICO with "I feel...", expressing my opinion, not presenting it as fact, but explaining why I felt - feel - the law applies. Perhaps you should Google the RICO Act. Knowingly engaging in an illegal activity on a continuing basis for profit falls under the Act, and when ebay knowingly allows fraudulent or illegal sales, and has done so for years, it fits. In my opinion, of course.

I mentioned the Coins category earlier, and ebay was a willing participant in ongoing sales of unmarked counterfeits of US coins in bulk quantities, blatantly in violation of the Hobby Protection Act and a no-brainer especially when sellers pictured the items and sometimes identified them as bogus.

I don't see where there's wiggle room in such a situation, but we are of course each entitled to an opinion.

The title of the thread is "How The Crooks Get Away With It..." and IN MY OPINION the bad sellers and ebay need to be held accountable, because the lack of accountability cuts right to the heart of the problem.

Walk that back? You've got to be kidding.

-Dunc