Police warn of rising Ebay fraud

CBC News (Canada) ^ | 9-13-03 | CBC Online staff

[palmer]

Notwithstanding some technical problems like account hijacking, EBay spells the end of the state monopoly on contract enforcement. Essentially for the last 1000 years or so the state has held itself as the enforcer of good information and good behavior. Now that monopoly is threatened so of course they will highlight any fraud they find and try their hardest to regulate it.

[Maurice Tift]

Representatives from Ebay say spoofed e-mails are a serious problem and undermine costumers' confidence in doing business online.

I always fill out the forms in the spoofed Ebay messages:
Name: Mongoo Bloofus, Jr.
Bank Name: First Wiccan Security
work phone: (bogus area code)
home number: (more bogus)
email address: (hmmmm...... could get interesting here)
email password: ....

Maybe just use a recently created web based email account filled with lots of false leads.... the criminal could actually be caught when he trys to follow one of the false leads.

[Gorzaloon]

Often, the buyer seems to have moved to another continent... people who had selling used CDs and books from New Jersey is suddenly offering large numbers of "too-good-to-be-true" impossible to get computers from the Netherlands... or the UK... of Australia. Sometimes the item location is listed as New York, but the price is listed in Australian dollars.

Well, well...Sounds exactly like the operation that is selling the new Canon G5 digital camera at a fraction of its $800 price!

[mass55th]

I'm a seller and leave negative feedback all the time. I've never once gotten an email from eBay asking me to use "Dispute Resolution." Your assumption that it was a fraudulent message is correct. I stopped forwarding the fraudulent eBay messages I've gotten to eBay. They've become too numerous to mention. I believe I received three in one day last week. They're almost as annoying as the ones for Viagra.

[Wolfie]

Yep. I get the feelng the end result will be legislation that cracks down on E-Bay, not the scammers. What were thinking, anyway? Entering into voluntary retail deals without govenrment interference. That's just crazy!

[tiamat]

Good for you!

You are to be commended for your dilligence in eporting to eBay as well as being clever enough to spot the fraud.

As someone who loves both eBay and Apple computers, all I can say is "Thanks" for making the eBay community a little safer!

Kudos!

Tia

[palmer]

Shopping sheeple seeking safety.

[Fixit]

I have one problem with eBay's commitment to fighting this type of fraud. They make it extremely HARD to find a way to report suspicious listings to them... it is buried under many layers of webpages and options. It took me over an hour to find it the first time I saw one of these scam offerings.

Boy, you aren't kidding about the "report a fraudulent auction" link being ridiculously hard to find. The ebay "help" system mentions it several times, but the pages that say things like "click the link below" never actually have the link below!

I gave up last time I was looking for it and just used google to find it.

Report trouble auctions to ebay.

Ebay UK uses the older (and easier) version of the fraud reporting form here.

(I always figured ebay should have a "report abuse" link on each aucition like how FR has one next to each post, but I guess that would just make too much damn sense.)

[Paul C. Jesup]

Ebay customers also sometimes receive e-mail messages that appear to be from Ebay, but are actually from someone trying to rip them off.

They're called "spoof" e-mails. They look authentic, carrying the Ebay logo and an Ebay return address.

They threaten to cancel customers' accounts if they don't reply with their account information.

This is old news, about 2 or 3 years old. Ebay has stated they NEVER e-mail you for personal information.

I would believe that the same people who fell for this also opened the virus attachments in the "I love you" virus e-mails.

[RichardW]

This hits close to home. I'm in the middle of a problem where it appears that a stolen item was sold over ebay. I suspect this is just the tip of a major iceberg.

[Paul C. Jesup]

Is fraud very common at Ebay?

It is not so much the fraud on the sellers' side that is the problem, but stupidity on the buyers' side.

Like the quote says: If it is too good to be true, it usually is.

[weatherFrEaK]

My wife's Ebay account was compromised last week along with her Yahoo! mail account, within 48 hours of each other. Different passwords on each and never a bogus email received requesting confidential info. Still no resolution from either Ebay or Yahoo! Her accounts are still hijacked. Their response time is extremely poor and, of course, it has to be something WE did on our end, not on their end. You never think it will happen to you, but when it does... No more Yahoo! or Ebay and we will share our experience with friends and family.

[mass55th]

"This hits close to home. I'm in the middle of a problem where it appears that a stolen item was sold over ebay. I suspect this is just the tip of a major iceberg."

I hope your problem doesn't turn out to be a major headache. Good luck. I've never bought any large priced items on eBay. Most of the things I've bought are DVD's and books.

[Tuxedo]

I'm a seller and leave negative feedback all the time

What annoys me is when you leave negative feedback for someone, they often retaliate, even when they were in the wrong. Happened to me just today. The jerk didn't abide by the auction terms, had neg feedback from other sellers offering similar mdse, and after I left neg fb, he retaliated. What a jerkwad...

eBay needs to have a way to remove this kind of feedback.

[RichardW]

I have this nagging feeling that I have stumbled into a major fencing operation. I've been in touch with the jurisdiction where I purchased the item.

[Porterville]

No, it's safe, you just have to make sure you KNOW what you are buying.

[xp38]

I think there is a threshold for me when I am no longer going to send money off to an unknown without the online escrow services. It would kick in way before $1900

[mass55th]

"eBay needs to have a way to remove this kind of feedback."

The negative feedback I leave is always because individuals fail to pay me, and I do this after a 26-30 day period has passed. I've had negative feedback left for me too by those buyers. In many cases, eBay will eventually remove that feedback or reduce it to a neutral because the person who left it ends up being suspended because they've bilked several other sellers. I've gotten to the point where I don't even care about the feedback anymore. But I refuse to be intimidated about leaving negative feedback for fear of getting it back in turn from some slug.

It never ceases to amaze me that many of these buyers who don't pay you, contact you or send a payment after you've already left negative feedback for them. I've had several write me and ask me if they can pay and if I'd request a reverse on the non-paying status they've been given by eBay. They begin to panic once they see that negative on their record. I've also gotten notes from people who have been banned from eBay because of their payment record. They beg to be able to pay for the items and in many cases, it's months past the time of their transaction with me and I no longer have the item. In any case, once I receive the credit for the closing fee from eBay and I leave negative feedback, I usually don't reverse it. I figure they wasted my time, failed to answer any of my emails, failed to pay within a reasonable time (approx. 30 days) and don't deserve any favors.

[July 4th]

There's still a lot of good stuff there, but you have to be a careful buyer. I usually sell a few things a year on there, just to dump some of my aging electronics, and I've had major problems in the last year or so with deadbeat buyers. Even ones who have good feedback. In my own experience, this is a new phenomenon.

[RedWhiteBlue]

They make it extremely HARD to find a way to report suspicious listings to them... it is buried under many layers of webpages and options.

Not only that, because of all of the embedded crap in those fraudulent e-mails, just opening one so that you can forward it to spoof@ebay.com tells the crooks that they've got a "live one." I seem to get one or two of these bogus e-mails on the weekends, and I have already forwarded about 4 of them to ebay when I found this out.

During the initial phase of the blaster/welchia virus activity, I started using a program called b9, which filters crap that it considers "non-standard" out of e-mails. Examples of things that it will filter are read receipts (every one of these e-mails was sending one back), attachments that contain scripts (viruses included), non-standard html tags and attributes, scripting, embedded and undesired tags, images from external servers, images that pass variables to external servers, images that appear to contain identifier information, images associated with cookie information, and 1x1 images.

In one of the fraudulent e-mails, b9 filtered out 48 separate items from the e-mail. If you don't have the ability to filter this crap out before you forward to e-bay, you are better off just deleting the message and making sure that your e-mail is not set up so that you don't view it in a preview pane.