eBay 13 Red Flags of Fraudulent Transactions | |
Due to the fact that I lost $797.00 on an Ebay scam, and that I worked with
Ebay and the FTC about it, I have some other things to look for when bidding on auctions (Ebay or others).
1. Check the sellers feedback. Lots of negatives, of course, will tell you
plenty.
2. Check the feedback given BY the seller
3. Check the feedback given by the person who gave the seller feedback.
4. Does the person you send the check to have the same address as
where the item is coming from.
These things may sound like a "given", and even a little strange, But here is what I have found. Sometimes a seller has good feedback, maybe a little, maybe a lot. In my "scam" case, the item I bought was from someone who had 100% feedback (around 20 or so). His story was very believeable. A store in Hollywood Florida that was closing, so they had several related items for sale, some in quantities of more than one. The price was not "too good
to be true". It was a little less expensive, but not dramatically so. It would have been a "nice deal", but not a "great deal", so it didn't set off any of those alarms in me. Since he had a quantity of some items, if you got more than one thing, they would combine shipping. The pictures that were included were not "perfect", like an ad. Some of the item's boxes were a little squashed and bumped around, because, supposedly, the store had been closed and everything was stacked up, some of the packaging got a little beat up. If the item(s) weren't to your satisfaction, you had 10 days to contact him, and he would refund your money, minus the shipping costs. They would take any form of payment, except Paypal, because, since the business had dissolved, their paypal account was no longer active (their business bank account was closed) If you sent a check, it had to clear before shipment. Just all the stuff that I've read and said in the dozens of items I had bought and sold before.
Of course, I bought the items, I sent a money order and I never got the items. I reported them to Ebay, and then the FTC.
Here's some of the things I didn't catch, that I should have. The guys store was in Hollywood Florida, I had to send the money order to NYC. (still could have been legit). I even got a shipping tracking number. His wonderful feedback was all from a half-dozen people, who, when I checked on THEIR feedback, had also only come from the same half dozen people. I then checked on any auctions those other people had, and low and behold, they were selling the SAME stuff, from the SAME place, with the SAME ad, and the SAME pictures. They were rotating the ad between them, and "buying" and giving each other feedback on being wonderful sellers and buyers.
Just a postscript here: 2 years later, the FTC called me, and I was interviewed and testified, because apparently, these individuals had something to do with "selling" these items to raise money for the 9/11 attacks. When the government moved in on them, it turned out to be over
100+ people involved in it, and included hundreds and hundreds of Ebay
and Yahoo auction scams. Of course, by now we have all heard of the group in Hollywood Forida, but in 1999 or early 2000, when this happened, it didn't mean anything to me or anyone else. But, thanks to the scam, and several
others, which, by the way, all the money went to other places, several different address in NYC, they were able to track down a great many of them.
No, I didn't get my money back, but it did give the government something to legally give them a search warrant for, so I think it was worth the $796.00, in this case, but it taught me how to better look for scams.
The scam artists are getting smarter (and of course, they are not all terrorists), they know what people look for in a scam, and they address those issues by the way they do their ads. I am sure they know the 13 Red Flags of Fraudulent Transactions, too. I have just added a few more. Checking the feedback system, on both sides, is something they cannot hide. The only way to get feedback is: the make-believe way, in which case, everyone will have a low feedback score, and they will be giving "attaboys" to each other, or you actually buy and sell, and your feedback will be from lots of different people, who have lots of different feedback ratings.
Maybe Ebay could do something, so that, when you see someones feedback, you can tell right away if there is a suspicious pattern, like the guy we bought from? That's probably something that a person with a computer brain (not me) could figure out how to do. Something like: "caution, most feedback from this individual's 50 comments come from 4 people". I don't know, I just know that it is something I pursue every single time I consider bidding on something. I don't let 1 or 2 bad comments necessarily throw in
the towel (unless they only have 1 or 2 comments), because I know you cannot please everyone all the time, and I know that stuff happens, things get lost in the mail, or damaged or whatever, but I definitely look at all the comments, and at who made the comments.
Last edited by Scrub; 05-24-08 at 12:57 PM.
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07-27-06, 05:30 AM
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