Ebay Red Line Error Nonsense

Fraud?... or simply ignorance?

Fraud with ignorance as a mitigating factor. No excuses either way.

I do seriously question whether anyone no matter how little they knew, would pay that kind of money without consulting anyone. $400, maybe. But this? I kind of doubt that any listings of this order of magnitude have ever sold for this kind of garbage.

No ignorance. Seller knows exactly what s/he is doing; the more outrageous the claim the better, for this sort of ruse. It's a philatelic clone of the Nigerian prince email scam.

I am accumulating these for my retirement. I can already feel the water of the Grenadines on my feet!

Copycat scamming fraud. Some with knowledge and some know nothing. They do not sell but greed springs eternal.

It doesn't matter if it's ignorance or greed, listing should be pulled IMHO!

It wouldn't be hard for ebay to employ a few stamp collecting "experts" who are at least familiar with stamps to act as judges or evaluators of which listings are not up to philatelic standards. This would cost them little as those people would not be ebay employees but private contractors paid by ebay for whatever evaluations they were asked to make.

ebay could just leave it to buyers to request that a listing be evaluated as legitimate or not. That might result in a few hundred -- or a few thousand requests. That's to be seen.

I'm sure there would be some downside to this, some inconveniences, but it's much better than the nothing system ebay has now. Without some method of evaluating whether listings are attempting to cheat unwary buyers, ebay is operating a kind of 19th Century Caveat Emptor (Buyer Beware) market that puts the entire burden on the buyer, and that's a type of capitalism the rest of the economy has long abandoned whether it's cars, clothing, food, or just about anything else. Even baseball and football plays come under review to determine if they're within the rules of the game. Consumers have rights. ebay simply prefers to ignore the whole issue, and that is outrageous.

Drew. that is a common sense idea. The challenge is that the stamps category is a trivial segment of the ebay business, so perhaps not something worth their investment.

"Seller is suspended"

*sigh*

... and also hire coin experts, and currency experts, and comic book experts, and sports cards experts, and antiques experts, and vintage tool/equipment experts, and automobile experts, and...

Where does it end? You can't just look at OUR little slice of the ebay universe. For ebay to adopt such an approach in one TINY collectibles category, it would mean that they would already have done so in the much larger collectibles category and worked their way down.

ebay is not going to go out and hire all these people to combat a problem that realistically affects a MINISCULE percentage of a TINY segment of ebay's overall commerce.

Think about it: What is the percentage of stamp buyers that would actually fall for a listing like this? 5%? 1%? 0.1%? 0.001%? Now extrapolate that over ebay's overall number of listings. Does that justify the expense (and hassle) of employing additional QUALIFIED (and who makes that determination?) experts?

No. Not ever.

You don't have experts policing flea markets, swap meets, and stamp shows either.

Caveat emptor covers this. If you don't know what you are buying, you can always ask an expert or other collector before you buy. If you can't or won't do your own research and due diligence before purchasing, that's ultimately your fault. Don't expect the rest of the world to police things for you.

Lest anyone think this is solely a novice issue, it isn't. I've made plenty of mistakes (some recently) buying material that turned out not to be what I thought it was. It's a learning experience. You just guard yourself against making it an expensive education...

Dan, I concur that a venue like ebay cannot vet the listings but they can vet the accounts better. By simply only allowing a maximum of two accounts with unique IP address (disallowing VPNs and other redirector ISPs which are known to be used for masking IPs) is something that is technically within easy reach for them.

But they do not care with 'good' financial reason. Use any percentage you like to calculate the number of mis-described/fraudulent listings across all ebay categories and you come up with a huge amount of income for them. As long as they can continue to brainwash buyers into thinking that the rating system and 'money back' is all they need, business model which supports fraud and mis-described listings very profitable for them. They have virtually zero risk as long as buyers do not insist that they vet the accounts.
Don

The internet is a big wild untamed beast. ebay is a small part of it and the stamp category is a tiny sliver of that. Stamp collecting is a very big deal to me but lets not expect ebay to feel the same. I don't expect them to take all of our complaints as seriously as we do. It may be a sad fact, but I would be devastated if the ebay stamp category disappeared tomorrow, but I doubt ebay would care too much.