Ebay Red Line Error Nonsense

This is really getting out of control on ebay. There are over a 100 of these on ebay right now:

air mail 6 cent stamp error print with white crease line red line

http://www.ebay.com/itm/air-mail-6-...AOSw6HJZvuav


including one that claims to have sold for $1795!

http://www.ebay.com/itm/RARE-GREEN-...047675.l2557

It has been obvious for some time that ebay could care less what goes on. It is every man for himself and they just collect fees. It is a joke.

Unbelievable! Checking the sellers other items, they apparently know nothing about philately. About the white line "print error." What I'm seeing looks like the stamp was creased before the wavy killer bar cancel was applied, and the stamp has been stretched back to unfold the crease. Why would someone think that makes a stamp "valuable?" And yeah, what's the big deal about a red line?

I have two thoughts. The first I am so rich that I should put all my red line stamps in a vault. The second is I can understand people that inherit stamps after checking ebay thinking they struck it big time.

And even more ridiculous is that the RARE Green Line listed in the first message isn't even a green line ... it is part of the adjoining stamp due to a slight miss-perf. Amazing if someone actually did buy this one.

The "buyer" has a rating of 0. Shill account buys, they exchange positive feedback, then one or the other cancels the transaction and the seller reclaims their fees. Confidence game but very poorly conceived.

Even more amusing, read the description:

Hi, free US Shipping priority . this 6 cents used stamp has a print error where you can see the creases on the stamp & the white line where ink did not print. Stamp also has a red line at the bottom.you can see in the pictures submitted. I'm not sure of the year. you can see the white line going down from the wing all the way past the I in America to the bottom of the stamp where the red line is. Ty for looking. I will ship asap. C25. 1941

I collect perfins and precancels, so I always checked US used on e-Bay. There used to be one or two of these outrageously priced stamps for sale every week, but lately there seems to be 20-30 every week. I e-mailed one seller who listed a 1¢ prexie coil as an "error", asking price: $2,000. I asked what the error was as I could not see one. His explanation: "The error is that it is made different than the others".

I quit shopping on e-Bay because they obviously do not give a damn if their customers are cheated as long as they get their cut.

edited for typos.

No. They just don't have expertise in every collectibles field nor the manpower to police millions of listings or manually interpret and respond to takedown reports.

Nor can they simply take every reporters' word for it that listing X is fake/wrong/etc. and have it autoremoved, as (1) how do you determine that the person doing the reporting knows what the heck they are talking about any more than the seller, and (2) competing sellers and vindictive buyers could use this mechanism in a vendetta against certain sellers rather than with valid reason.

At the end of the day, no one should expect ebay to police anything for them. Do your own research and take 2 tablespoons of caveat emptor.

Every time that someone points out on this forum outrageous abuses of selling on ebay some posters take Ebays side. Strange. It is too hard for ebay. ebay does not have the expertise. Buyers might not be right or knowledgeable enough. That is ridiculous. Look at the listing that started this thread. Does anyone need expertise to see what a joke it is? This listing is not an outlier either. There are many like it. If ebay cannot do anything to clamp down on such nonsense they are nothing but a fee collecting glorified classified advertisment consolidator. And yes, ebay should be expected to police items. Do your own research is fine but if it comes from an advanced collector with vast knowledge and research resources it is selfish in the extreme. It is saying that begginers need to be burned in order to learn. That is how a hobby dies.

Oh please. "Taking ebay's side"? Give me a break.

It's called reality. Do you have any clue on what sort of manpower expense would be required to effectively staff a department with enough people with sufficient knowledge to police all the listings?

You say "Look at the listing that started this thread. Does anyone need expertise to see what joke it is?"

YES!!

If you showed the listing in question to a non stamp collector, i.e., THE PEOPLE AT ebay WHO WOULD BE POLICING THE LISTINGS, their response would likely be "I don't see the listing violation. What's wrong with it?"

You have experience as a stamp collector so it's perfectly obvious to you. Not to overseas minimum-wage script readers.

In order to do what you are proposing, you would have to hire stamp collctors to police the stamp categories, coin collectors to police the coin categories, baseball card collectors, comic book collectors, etc., etc., ad nauseum.

And you can be darned sure that any category "experts" to be hired would demand far higher wages than ebay's support norm.

It simply is not realistic from a business perspective given the number and variability of listings in question.

It has nothing to do with "taking ebay's side". I've been plenty critical of ebay, the company, but this is an area where what you are proposing, while well intentioned, simply is not feasible.

I agree with rev. on this. What you do not want to do is inhibit the clueless from listing stamps on ebay (or worse, have ebay close down their stamp department because of too much kvetching). That is where the best of ebay originates. There is no need to protect the clueless buyer from sellers of rare-line garbage. None are ever sold.

What this all boils down to is ebay does not care one whit. That is why blatant criminal enterprises such as the cartel flourish on ebay. There are means of sorting out items to be further scrutinized. How do they weed out items with say confederate flags on them? Such items are gone in a heartbeat. Also, I see a lot of comments that epress a level of trepidation that ebay may pull out of the stamp market if they actually had to put effort into policing it and so we cannot have that. God forbid! Nonsense. The amount of misid'd, fake, faulty sold as sound and altered stamps on ebay is staggering. If anybody believes that is acceptable I give up.

Fake and counterfeit coins are reported by coin collectors.

https://www.coincommunity.com/forum...FORUM_ID=163

https://www.coincommunity.com/forum...FORUM_ID=162

The same way that they prevent stamps from Iran and Cuba from being sold: auomated bots. Removing a listing based on certain words being in the listing or being for a specific product is easy. That can be automated. It doesn't require context or subjective analysis. What you are proposing does.




Fake is a different animal from what is in the OP of this thread. The stamp in the OP is not fake, therefore is not listed in violation. Rather it is not worth what the seller claims it is. How do you police issues of value? Who makes the judgment that a price is too high or that an "error" really is not an EFO worthy of a premium?

Again, you are in the territory of SUBJECTIVE analysis and determination, not a de facto violation of ebay's policies, so it cannot be automated.

None of this is new territory. It has been lamented, rehashed, and anguished over since before I started using ebay in 1998.

Great point. Nothing has changed since 1998.

The problem here is that this really is fraud. There is no "error". The red line is a normal part of producing these stamps.