Will Ebay Ever Be A Safe Place For Collectors To Buy Stamps?

I thought trimmed perforated stamps impersonating rare coils were an Anthony's exclusive, but apparently I was wrong:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/US-Stamp-1...AOSwemVazZi8

I reported this item to ebay, but we all know how seriously ebay takes that.

Any suggestions how to save this buyer from getting screwed to the tune of $1500?

My follow-up correspondence to the seller and ebay:

Your Scott's #356 does not appear to be authentic. The top to bottom margins fall well short of an authentic copy, and upon magnification, the top perforations seem to have been rather crudely trimmed. I suggest that you cancel this listing, and inform your bidder that the item was listed in error. A copy of this correspondence has been sent to both ebay and the stamp community forum. Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

No idea what the item was, since that listing has ended and ebay's craptacular new redirect on ended listings now points to... an Anthony's listing for a completely different stamp. Oh the irony.

Note to everyone: The new ebay redirects make it CRITICALLY important that any time we link to an ebay listing, that we include a screenshot in the post. As soon as the listing ends, all context is now lost.

Surprisingly, if you click on the link several times, it does occasionally go back to the subject listing of the $1500 coil.

Morning all,

Not sure ebay is any better or worse than other philatelic venues when it comes to buying things, especially stamps. Nothing will ever replace a good old fashion hands on inspection by a knowledgeable buyer. Agree the recent changes by ebay make it a harder place to deal with bad eggs after the fact.

Good old warning is more and more important than ever: Buyer beware.

Dan

Why should ebay care? Stamp sales are a tiny fraction of revenue. There is no financial incentive to exert any real effort to police the listings. So long as buyers keep buying they reap the fees. If buyers boycotted the stamp category (will never happen) they would still not care. The stamp categories could go away and they would not care. ebay has its sights set on becoming an Amazon competitor peddling the same retail stock (mostly Chinese now). One thing is for sure, ebay has been a boon to fraudsters of all kinds.

Gentle suggestion: To have any chance of being effective against fraudulent sellers, the items reported must be OBVIOUS fakes, forgeries, misidentifications, etc. And by that, I mean OBVIOUS to anyone. To expect the ebay reviewers to have the knowledge to identify real vs fake coils from a scan requires too much of them. They weigh a complaint against what the seller claims - they can't tell sour grapes from facts - they have minimal reference material at hand, if any - they side with the seller and collect their fees. Better fights should be picked than fake coils if you want to find the chink in the armor.

They do not care. It is not always an ID/fake issue. I have reported the cartel listings literally hundreds of times for obvious shill bidding, multiple sales of the same item etc.. Nothing happens. Nothing. I do not patronize ebay any longer.

No, ebay will never be a safe place for greedy, naive, and/or stupid collectors to buy stamps.

The public highways will never be a safe place for drunk drivers.

We cannot expect ebay EVER to be a SAFE marketplace for stamps. I also don't expect that we should. BUT, I don't think this means that ebay should be avoided. In fact, it can still be a useful and thriving marketplace.

In my opinion, there are two classes of sellers: ones that don't know their stamps are misrepresented and those that do. We can lower the damage/impact of either, but not eliminate them. Nonetheless, we shouldn't "throw the baby out with the bath water".

The only way we can protect/help for those that don't know they are misrepresenting, is to try to contact them prior to selling the item and inform them. This problem will NEVER be fixed, because there are always new sellers and uninformed sellers that may have more items to sell. We can only hope to intervene before damage is done.

For those that knowingly misrepresent items and/or fraudulently alter them, we potentially have more ammunition to intervene and stop them, but they can always come back again as another and start doing it again (cartel, etc.).

As has been said a number of times before by others, knowledge is key. ebay isn't unique as a marketplace, and misrepresentation and alteration/fraud isn't new and can be found in most any marketplace, including major stamp shows. Should we boycott stamp shows because one or more dealers is committing fraud? Of course not. There are and have been dealers at stamp shows that have misrepresented stamps (condition and identification), some of them with full knowledge.

I applaud those who call out fraudulent ebay sellers, and also contact ebay and ASDA. Even if ACTION isn't taken by either of them, those who read the SCF postings become aware, and maybe gain knowledge, so some useful reducing of damaging transactions may result.

But again, I think that blanket boycotting, or thinking that this problem can be eliminated aren't realistic.

The foremost reason ebay is such a breeding ground for fraud is the anonymity it provides. You can be in the UK shipping from a US location using an account that you purchased with feedback intact and shill bidders galore and operate with impunity. It is one thing to misrepresent your wares at a stamp show face to face and quite another to hide behind distance, anonymity and the ebay platform.

Anthony's is a different type of animal. They have a brick and mortar presence and simply deal in the "bring it on" type of dishonest dealings while throwing in the wrinkle of displaying the ASDA logo. That one would seem to be much easier to solve but it continues because ebay and the ASDA do not react to complaints. Fees are their God and nothing else matters.

The bottom line is that trust in the collecting world is of paramount importance for collectors at all levels of experience and ebay does not afford that. In fact it is one of the worst places to tread into the collecting waters. The biggest and ugliest sharks populate those bath waters.

Revenuecollector: Unless the UK differs from the USA (and why would it) if you get redirected to a suggested new lot simply click on the blue word link "listing" that is in the large otherwise black text sentence with its sky blue background that reads "The listing you're looking for is no longer available. Check out this new item that we've found for you" and you go straight to the closed item that you seek, complete with its sales price etc. All context is not lost. Glenn

Thank you Glenn. Click "listing." That works.

The primary issue is not ebay; the primary issue of people taking advantage of other people has been around in this hobby since the beginning. The only weapon in the war against fraud is education.

ebay (and other online buying venues) only changed the nature of the education that is required. By suddenly offering a 24/7/365 selling opportunity to every Tom, Dick, and Harry buyers now have any extra burden in understanding who they are buying from. No longer do buyers only have to about the material they are purchasing, they also need to do discovery work on the seller.

ebay can be faulted for their effective marketing efforts which brainwashed half the earth into thinking that buying form a totally unknown seller is perfectly fine. Doh. We were all raised with two buying premises; first don't buy something sight unseen and second don't buy from a total strange who you will never see again. ebay has been masterful in changing these centuries old common sense paradigms.

But any system, whether it is ebay or tax laws, allows people to stay up at night trying to figure out how to scam it. Humans are greedy, egotistical, and will figure out ways to scam other humans no matter how bullet proof you try to make any system.

This is why I have put most of my effort over the last 5 years into education (both in forums like this and with Stamp Smarter). I truly hope that if buyers learn only one thing it is that they must do discovery into who they are buying from.
Don

Glenn,

Unfortunately, there are several different redirect types that ebay is pushing out right now, presumably because they are doing A/B testing. Not all of them have the blue bar with the link to the original item.

Additionally, there is no guarantee that ebay will continue to have a link back. They could abandon that at any time. Also, auctions expire from ebay's cache after a certain number of days, so for the thread to continue to make sense to readers in the future, it is important to have a screenshot of the information in question.

For example, when I click in the link in the OP, the following is what I see. Note how there is only a message that the original item is no longer available, with no link at all back to the original item.