2 Cent Washington Crazy Ebay Sales

Forty or more years ago I was at a flea market in Vermont. A woman had a child's stamp album with a few dollars worth of stamps on her table. She was asking $75. I was free to either pay a ridiculous amount for her stamps, but I was also free to walk away, which I did.
The makers of Prevagen have raked in $165 million over the past 10 years for a product for which there is no scientific evidence that it does anything beneficial.
Personally I am much more disturbed by the latter than the former.

I don't think this is a case of someone being stupid enough to pay thousands of dollars for nearly worthless stamps.

More likely it is being done for its humor value, or for money laundering.

Looking at some of these from the list of sold US stamps sorted by price on ebay, these all have the same MO:

1. The seller has a new ebay account.
2. A common stamp is listed with a ridiculous price
3. Location of stamp is always a different city, as if it was chosen at random.
4. Item is always bought through a "best offer accepted" method.
5. Some of the sellers have other items for sale, some at more reasonable prices.

The best offer that was accepted could have been $.01. You could try that, offer one of them a penny and see what happens. I'm not going there as I don't want to be stuck with the postage. You could keep the joke going by having it shipped registered and insured. You could brag that you bought a $10,000 stamp on ebay for a penny. Some people find that sort of thing funny.

Or it could be money laundering. How effective that would be in this case is not clear. In money laundering, you have a stash of stolen or ill-gotten money you want to get in your bank account without arousing suspicion. Setting-up ebay transactions taking money from your illicit account into your legit account could be a laundering technique, but as all these transactions are electronic, it still seems it would be pretty easy to trace.

So I vote such listings and transactions are jokes. They made us wonder what was going on.

The money laundering is not so much transferring money from two accounts of your own, it's selling contraband without the sudden money being looked at too closely. It's all pre-arranged.

In my opinion it is more likely that some of these are people trying to build up sales (pumping up the books) with the hope they can sell the company in the future. We know that this has previously occurred with the scammer in Great Britain. Money laundering is typically done in ways which avoid any paper trails (i.e. businesses and professions which include tips and other cash transactions).

And a few of them are probably people who are building ebay accounts for resale, having a few high dollar transactions helps in that case too (since the majority of fake transactions they are generating are small).
Don

Most of the sellers are new to ebay and have "0" feedback and only 1 sale. I doubt any of these transactions are real but I can't even guess what the reason is for doing this.