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

I love ebay, personally. I buy and sell a lot there. It's a great venue 99% of the time and it's among the first places I refer people to for buying stamps and supplies. That doesn't mean we shouldn't care when thieves (even if there aren't all that many of them) are allowed to operate with impunity, with ebay plugging their ears and going "la la la la" to pretend they don't know. If there were a ring of burglars active in my town and the cops pretended there was no such thing, people would rightly be up in arms about it, demanding that they do something.

Is there anything we can do about ebay's policies, which - make no mistake - are there to serve ebay itself and its shareholders? Other than being educated about what you're buying, probably not. Basically this thread and others like it are kind of like complaining about the weather, or about our politicians, etc. But people can and do complain about those things, probably because it makes us feel better in some way. No one likes to see crooks - any kind of crooks - hurt people and get away with it. The fact that some people are upset about this is a GOOD thing, even if it amounts to tilting at windmills. I'd hate to live in a world where people would look upon criminals acting with impunity and say "I just don't care. They can go ahead and steal as long as its not from me".

Columbian12,
I won't post the links but you can easily see the problem if you Google 'buy ebay top rated account'. You can quickly find that there is a brisk market in these accounts, heck there are domain names and well established .com web sites which are dedicated to the practice. A notable top rated seller web page has a link on the front page marked "Stealth Accounts". Additionally I have spend an average of 2 hours per day dealing with folks and there experiences with bad listings over the last year. Speaking of homework, I never said remove multiple accounts but rather I said, "better vetting of seller accounts and/or making multiple accounts very difficult".

Having a thriving 3rd party industry in selling 'top rated' accounts hardly ranks as a "a few people with a grudge against ebay". There are some folks who think beyond just themselves and care about the newer hobbyists and future of philately. Others may have different priorities and some feel that learning how to pick through the fraudulent listings is a entry level skill that must be learned. While I concur that education is very important in any hobby I do not subscribe to the perspective that new hobbyists have to 'learn the hard way'.

Stamp Smarter works with sellers and gets about 40% of them to improve their listings. This potentially has saved newer hobbyists over $365,523 during the last year. Additionally, the educational value from those have figured out how to use Stamp Smarter to make better buying decisions is also a substantial number. As the database grows (now closing in on 1500 Reviews) we are getting more significant reports. We always had good representation of USA material but now are getting more international reviews. The amount of fake/forged British Colony has been surprising, perhaps rivaling that of the US Washington/Franklin coils (which has been estimated at 80% of the listings).

We also promote the better online sellers and also host the 1847USA web site in its entirety. I have personally put in well over 80 hours in the port and updating of this site. Again, this is not the action of a person who simply doesn't like ebay. It reflects our deep desire to give back to the hobby and try to help its diminishing numbers. It is fine if others don't want to burn time or money in this effort, but please don't white wash those that do.

Jenny2U,
Thank you. I concur, the ebay T&C's swings both ways in terms of being problematic. But this reflects ebay prioritization of shareholders and this year's annual report at the detriment of sellers and buyers.
Don

edit;
Want to buy a ebay Top rated account? Here is a small snippet from one of the leading web sites which sell them.

Quote:
Platinum Package

This package is great for someone to establish themselves online. We will provide you with all the things you need to become successful online:

1 – Established ebay account with 1000 positive feedbacks!

2 – Access to over 7 million products across from the most reliable dropshipping suppliers on the planet!

These ebay accounts are established meaning these accounts are years old and have been used to buy and sell products! These are not ebay accounts with loads of rubbish feedbacks selling EBOOKS ETC. Alot of time and effort has been done to get these ebay accounts in the condition they are in.

3 – Online website included in the price.

4 – Full lifetime training and support!

Now how can ebay support this? It could certainly be said that there is a need to legitimately support the occasional transfer of a account (i.e when a company changes ownership). But does anyone really want to argue that it should be so loose that an entire 3rd party industry develops in the selling of Top Rated accounts?

In the past I have examined the 'accounts for sale' site you mention studebaker. I spent a great deal of time looking around on it as the concept intrigued me. That forum is apparently a site for people who have been kicked off of either ebay or paypal and were seeking to get a new clean account so they could resume doing business. I never saw any indication that there were stamp sellers on the forum - rather people who sold clothes, and purses, and other stuff. Yet you mention this underground business suggesting it is somehow proof of the stamp hobby being in jeopardy? I don't get the connection, sorry. If all these clowns on the "losers looking to get back on ebay" forum were thrown off ebay or paypal, doesn't that by itself suggest that ebay and paypal do enforce their T&C and throw people off? And if these people are getting kicked off, what is the mechanism by which that happens? Logically, either by ebay "self-policing" or by some kind kind of follow-up on complaints from ebay users. Interestingly, these are two things that some people here say do not EVER happen. The people here who continually perpetuate anti-ebay sentiment suggest that ebay turns a blind eye to bad sellers. The fact that an underground forum exists made up of people who were kicked off ebay and paypal proves otherwise, doesn't it?

On the contrary, the fact that they can get kicked off ebay, buy an account and promptly be right back up and runnng doing the same thing proves the point some are trying to make.

A recurring theme here for some is that ebay isn't doing ANYTHING about bad sellers. This cottage industry mentioned by studebaker suggests they ARE doing something. They obviously have SOME policing methods in place that result in people being banned. That's SOMETHING.

There is no ebay prohibition against multiple accounts so there is not a need to BUY an account. With regard to sellers who have been "banned", how hard would it be for them to open up a new account under a friend's name, or relative, or whatever.

As said earlier, ebay is probably 99% good. Maybe a higher good % than financial advisors, lawyers, builders, doctors, and the list goes on. I personally subscribe to the intelligent market theory, and based upon ebay's market valuation they are doing VERY well OVERALL.

Also said earlier, it's like complaining about the weather. Sure there are bad sellers and some of them are on ebay in the stamp category. And ebay has a buyer protection plan that addresses that issue.

I think once you reach the point at which the horse is dead...you can stop beating it.

Q/ Who cares how many "people are needed to police a Category"?

Q/ Of what practical importance is the number of "people are needed to police a Category"?

Thought Experiment: name a collectibles category - you can get a list at Collectors Weekly or Antique Trader - that might not have the same problem as ours. Now count all the categories that will. Now pretend you are ebay, and imagine trying to police all of these categories, all of the time.

And what is ebay to do about this barnyard when one of the animals is justly accused of bias against a particular seller? Answer: shut it down. Since they actually did shut the system down, would it be too much to guess that there was at least one collectibles category (out of how many hundreds) in which the reviewers were accused of abusing their role?

ebay's choices:

- let software unwind individual transactions, each time the buyer clicks the UnWind button;

- police the listings (which vastly outnumber the transactions);

- police a network of policers that police the listings.

Forget our needs. Think about their needs. I see only one responsible choice.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

edited to avoid the inadvertently snarky tone of an honest rhetorical question

Columbian12, riddle me this - who specifically said ebay is doing nothing about bad sellers? If you want to start with a false premise and argue from there, good luck with that, but I call BS.

There is a difference between doing nothing, and doing nothing effective.

The entire subject of this thread is How The Crooks Get Away With It... if you choose to ignore or spin away the answer, that's your choice. But to address the horse that is not dead, but kicking in agony in the street, they get away with it because they, and apparently you, think that getting an ID kicked off ebay is an effective deterrent.

We shine a light on the problem partly because that's what sends the cockroaches scrambling for cover. With ebay's decisions to backslide and end watchdog programs in Stamps and Coins categories, it is foolish to ignore that circumstances CAN be and WERE changed. It was online criticisms revealing poor deterrence by ebay - the differences between what they said and what they actually did - that helped bring about the Stamp Watch Committee and a similar program in the Coins category.

Despite what you have written, some of us knew, because we were part of the program, that some of what ebay did WAS effective. Their stated goal when the Watch group was formed was to rid ebay of persistent bad sellers, and with major cooperation from the APS that goal was quite successful, and believe me, the APS was the key. I personally worked intensively online with Bob Lamb himself who took a deep interest in achieving those goals, and we had online discussions dealing with certain problem sellers - something almost totally lacking from ebay - and Bob got things done in spectacular fashion, on a one-by-one basis dealing with each bad seller.

I and others have always acknowledged the good work that was done, and shame on you for suggesting that it compares in any way to "beating a dead horse" or "complaining about the weather". Every bad seller banned and every bad sale nipped in the bud was a real victory. It's a thankless job and rather than demean the work, I'd suggest you take a whack at a few bad sellers yourself, because it might open your eyes.

Here endeth the lesson for today.

-Dunc

I'm far more worried about being fooled by forgers who are likely long dead than I am about being taken by an active scam artist. I collect the entire German area (land of 10,000 overprints) in (mostly) used condition. It's not an area that's terribly prone to fake perfs and regumming, but it's got plenty of its own issues. I'm rarely if ever worried about whether the seller is trying to pull a fast one, but there are enough forgeries floating around that it pays to be wary no matter who the seller is.

My position on ebay's policing of bad sellers/bad listings is that 1) There aren't that many scam artists, but it's hard to do anything about them, even when recognized 2) that stinks and I'll be happy to tell people that it stinks 3) ebay has reasons why they handle it the way they do and 4) there's basically nothing I can do about it, but I'll still complain. There's no agenda behind my complaints other than I hate to see innocent people taken advantage of while the criminals get away with it scot free. It's empathy for the victim, nothing else. Criminals who rob banks and convenience stores know they'll face prison time if caught. Criminals who operate on ebay have to deal with a short term inconvenience of getting a new selling ID (if even that) and basically nothing else. Regardless of the reasons for it, that stinks.

It should be noted that fraud is not unique to ebay and online con artists get away with it all too frequently, regarless of the medium they are using to connect with their victims. It seems like the perpetrators are rarely prosecuted by the law; they just have to face some short term inconveniences when they're temporarily shut down.

The quote below is regarding the recent shootings in Charleston, but the sentiment still applies:

I would like to thank everybody who posted in this thread. I think the interaction between posters was excellent, the topic important, and should not be compared with "trying to change the weather" since any third-grader would know that there is nothing we can do to accomplish that, but by trying to be dilgent in canvassing ebay to attempt to protect the inexperienced **CAN** be accomplished or certainly can make a difference.

A comment on this post;

"Last, it is another misconception that a lot of people are needed to police a Category. The Stamp Community Watch had, if memory serves me correctly FIVE experts and ONE Reviewer for ebay. The EMR Program had about the same amount of experts (perhaps a few more) and TWO ebay Reviewers. And both programs were very effective with a very high rate of action taken by ebay upon expert advice."

Just want to clarify that the people who were the ebay Reviewers in the Stamps category, also covered the Coin and I think the Comic Book or Baseball Card categories, so again, not as many people are involved as would seem at first glance.

And this;

"Since they actually did shut the system down, would it be too much to guess that there was at least one collectibles category (out of how many hundreds) in which the reviewers were accused of abusing their role?"

While your writing is (as I've told you several times as a big fan!) often very clever. But it is also often full of nonsense that you seem to pull out of a hat just to try to make what might be an invalid point. I have honestly not heard of any accusations that a reviewer was "abusing their role".

And last;

"Forget our needs. Think about their needs. I see only one responsible choice."

And pray tell, why would we want to do that? Why would we want to lay back and be raped by many unfair and/or ineffective policies? Well, an argument could be made that if one is unhappy with the venue, he can simply choose not to participate and I have nothing to counter that with except that it seems to me that amounts to turning your back on something that could provide you with material for your hobby. So would it not be a better choice to vote by being more active in trying to "right the wrongs"?

I did not suggest that you heard any such thing, but I would happily suggest that ebay shut-down the listings review system for cause, and that it would be useful for us to think about what that cause might have been.

That somebody, somewhere, made a claim that the reviewers were biased would be a really good reason for ebay to step back, see that adjudicating how many perfs can dance on the side of a stamp is about as unsatisfying as adjudicating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and shut the system down.

As to the clever thing:

https://goscf.com/t/43924&whichpage=2#377190 ... asked, and

https://goscf.com/t/43924&whichpage=2#377255 ... answered

As for "Forget our needs. Think about their needs. I see only one responsible choice.", please forgive my shorthand.

During our earlier go-around on this issue in October, I pressed for people to try and look at things from ebay's point-of-view, because understanding how the world got to be the way that it is can be a useful first step in figuring-out how to change it.

That you began posting in this thread by saying that ebay is worrying more about their shareholders & profitability than either their sellers or their buyers is something that I take as a personal triumph.

The "I see only one responsible choice" was for their management, eg, ebay is better-off having shut the system down.

Again, which choice makes sense for them?

- let software unwind individual transactions, each time the buyer clicks the UnWind button;

- police the listings (which vastly outnumber the transactions);

- police a network of policers that police the listings.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

To me, that is probably the single most important sentence in this entire thread!

If one wants ebay to change their policies, they need to make a business case showing the impact to their bottom line. They won't be swayed by arguments about morality or protecting a hobby, etc. You'd have to explain to them why their current policy is costing them $x amount in business or how they could gain $x amount more by changing it. These things are very difficult (if not impossible) to quantify with any kind of precision. More than likely they've run those numbers themselves, which is why they have the policies they have today.

They undoubtedly believe the most cost effective way to address the problem of fraud is just to issue refunds to buyers. It's a policy that serves its purpose in the vast majority of cases and is acceptable to the vast majority of buyers. Yes, there are many cases where a buyer won't know he's been duped until years later (if ever) and can't get their money back, but I can't see ebay changing their policies anytime soon over the small (percentage-wise) number of cases that fit that description. The vast majority of refunds they issue surely have to be for sellers that never ship items to begin with or ship something obviously not as described, etc. What we're talking about in this thread has to be a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the total number of "bad" transactions they deal with. While it would be nice if ebay did more in the stamp category to protect buyers, I'd be pretty surprised to see it change for the better anytime soon.

Absolutely. Which is why it's so important to try to help out our less experienced fellow collectors by trying to weed out problematic listings. Look, it isn't much different than the way others here help newer posters who ask simple questions about stamps, and many of the members here will quickly try to help him/her out by supplying answers. Either way, we are trying to help the less experienced. We invite all of you to join us in the effort.




I did that in the letter I sent to President Donohoe last year. Every time a buyer on ebay realizes he's been duped after the time has passed for him to claim a refund, he will conclude that ebay didn't do enough to protect him from being duped and he may walk away from the hobby or the site. Either way, ebay loses. But of course, since we (surprise!) never had the courtesy of a response we have no idea if that argument had any impact whatsoever!

Bill, observing ebay's strategies over the years, it becomes abundantly clear that their only concern is the next pending examination of their bottom line, NOT the long term success of the company. One of the clearest examples of that was when they knowingly and repeatedly allowed illegal sales of counterfeit silver dollars and trade dollars, in direct violation of the Hobby Protection Act. They repeatedly made conscious choices to allow illegal auctions to run rather than shut them down, despite being informed by watchdogs that the sales were illegal. Their mindset was to do nothing that would have an immediate effect on sales - even if it meant breaking the law.

You know, old Henry Ford was a bit of a crackpot but he definitely knew how to build a successful company. Spending huge amounts of money to set up a sophisticated assembly line took away from his short-term profits but was a huge investment in the future. And his competitors thought he was nuts when he doubled the wages of his workers, but that also was a long term investment, making it possible to retain experienced, efficient workers as opposed to training them only to lose them to competitors who might offer a few pennies more.

What we can learn from Henry Ford is that the long term is what's important, not the short term gains - Ford's competitors joked about him in the press of the day, they just didn't get it - and neither does ebay.

When ebay ignored massive sales of fake Gucci products, it took a lawsuit to straighten them out, and even that didn't seem to instill any sort of corporate conscience. Sure, it's a successful business, but they could be better, both ethically and financially.

What they CHOOSE to do vs what they COULD do about fraud are worlds apart, and I don't buy for a minute that they are doing anything near what would be reasonable.

Firms much smaller than ebay, for example, hire "secret shoppers" to help identify problems (although I think ebay should do it "in house"). It's just a tiny part of the cost of doing business, but if ebay chooses to ignore known long-term problems (like the Cartel that keeps returning in the Stamps category), they are missing an opportunity to apply a little proactive pressure. My sister was a Secret Shopper. They don't shop at random, they are directed to known or suspected problem areas and the service easily pays for itself. Critics seem to miss the point of how oversight of a category is handled, they don't need to examine every item - obviously just like a Secret Shopper, you target suspected problem areas. A $2 Gucci bag? Early US coils most often faked? Well, there ya go. Follow the red flags. A few "Secret Shopper" buys of fake Gucci bags could've saved ebay a huge amount of money and avoided a major lawsuit and terrible publicity.

And also to further concentrate the effort, as others have pointed out, a very high percentage of sellers on ebay are good. So they mostly just need to check out out those who are being reported through the existing system.

And ebay should add to their Terms of Service that auctions may be subject to Secret Shopping, even if they never use such a service - a Beware of Dog sign by the Big Dog in the online marketplace.

Yes, sellers would be inconvenienced by a Secret Shopper. But if they were flagged for something suspicious, they would be checked out, either found good or bad, and so a seller found to be OK would benefit.

To doubters who think ebay is simply overwhelmed and can't do any effective policing, rather than bring up the red herring of all the categories on ebay and the enormity of it all, lets compare two competing stamp sellers - ebay Stamps and the APS Stampstore. The APS does more work than ebay does per item in a large inventory of stamps, including handling and shipping the stamps. Yet they have no problem dealing with questionable items and corresponding in person when there's an issue.

For example, I search for a certain variety of the orange 15c US Special Delivery stamp #E13. This stamp and #E16 look alike, the major difference being the perf count. Sometimes either intentionally or accidentally, the cheaper #E16 is offered as #E13. The "Srail Test" done to an online image to compare perfs usually reveals the mistake. As a courtesy, when looking for #E13's via the APS site I have occasionally reported those that look to be misidentified, to prevent a bad sale. It has never taken more than an hour for the APS to check them out, and they always respond with a genuine email message, not a canned response. On ebay, problems much more serious than that are often apparently just ignored, but who really knows because they often don't respond. The APS and ebay are both online venues, third parties selling others' stamps. It is possible on ebay to directly contact the seller, which I do in the example of #E13 vs #E16, so that's even less work for ebay in comparison to the APS, and yet for some mysterious reason they can't handle it.

I'm just saying...

-Dunc

[Edited to correct value, "15c" #E13.]

I understand that story-telling is the most effective way to convey information, but "he will conclude" is predictive mind reading.

Perhaps the buyer will blame the seller, not the street corner flea market in which the sale took place. People who get food poisoning from grocery items might blame the grocery or, based on experience, blame the manufacturer. People who get junk mail might blame the post office. People who suffer a traffic delay might blame the people who built the road.

And perhaps the buyer will blame themself. We've seen one of our colleagues post that he certs every item for which he paid more than U$D 100. And we all know that buying something that is misrepresented kinda requires that you did not know enough about what you were buying to spot the mis-identification in the first place (or upon arrival & inspection).

The internet in general, and ebay in particular, allows more people to buy more things, faster, that they know almost nothing about. If you are in a bigger hurry to buy than you are to learn, inspect, and verify, you are asking for trouble, no matter where you buy your stamps ... or anything else.




Forty-odd years ago I had a ninety-odd-year-old neighbor who remembered attending a "world's fair" (probably the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition) where, at the Ford exhibit, you could walk the U-shaped assembly line (set up right there in the exhibit) and watch them assemble your car, part-by-part and, at the end of the line, hand over your Three Hundred Dollars (yes, U$D 300) and drive it home.

We like to tell the story of The Great Innovator, but it helps to remember the context in which the innovator was innovating; people were building whole airplanes in their back yards, nu?




Not to go all Tragedy Of The Commons on you, but the important difference between that great story about counterfeit luxury goods (see the link in the OP) and our little treasures is that the intellectual property rights, in one case, have a single owner with a revenue stream to protect and, in our case, are (to put it kindly) widely dispersed.

Why would we expect the result in one case to be the same as the other?







Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey