Scammers selling counterfeit currency and eBay doesn’t care

[w00dst0ck2703]

Scammers selling counterfeit currency on EBay, and they could care less.  Talked to half a dozen customer support agents, whom I could barely understand and they informed me that I need to wait for these scammers to provide me a refund and ship them the counterfeit coins back 😂.  I informed them that it’s a felony here in the United States to counterfeit currency, to include possessing and shipping it.  Of course all they could do was keep parroting pre written responses.

What a joke.  

 

[nenu-5410]

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@nenu-5410 wrote:

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@nenu-5410 wrote:

Please quote the USPS rules on counterfeits, everyone would need to be aware.

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136 Nonmailable Goods

136.3 Counterfeit and Pirated Items

Any type of counterfeit or pirated article is prohibited in outbound international mail.

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136.3 Counterfeit and Pirated Items

Any type of counterfeit or pirated article is prohibited in international mail.

136.4 Cigarettes and Smokeless Tobacco

Cigarettes (including roll-your-own tobacco) and smokeless tobacco products as defined in Publication 52, part 471 are nonmailable when sent in outbound or inbound international mail. The exceptions for mailing under Publication 52, section 472.2 are not available for shipments of such products in international mail. This standard prevails regardless of any information to the contrary in the Individual Country Listings.

[whatmorefabric]

You can return it because you do not intend to defraud the seller.      The key word in the law is intend.  

[myangelandmyprincess]

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@w00dst0ck2703 wrote:

 No, they offered to refund me half and I keep the coins lol.  There were several negative reviews in the past few days that popped up, in which people were saying the seller was refusing to refund unless they deleted the negative reviews.  Well guess what?  All the negative reviews are gone now.  Now I have to wait 5 days for eBay to even do anything about it despite escalating it already and providing proof that the coins are counterfeit.  It’s a shame.

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If the seller doesn't provide return shipping costs you should be able to get a refund without a return.  I would proactively let them know what it would cost to return tracked and ask about getting those return costs...

[maxine*j]

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@w00dst0ck2703 wrote:

...  It’s not enough money to care about losing, but buyers shouldn’t have to weed out scams on a platform as big as eBay with the resources to proactively stop them, IMO.

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The way eBay gets to know that someone is selling counterfeit or otherwise no-good items is when buyers file INAD claims.   Enough of those, and eBay does take action.  Refusing to use the INAD procedure is a boon to the bad guys.

With something like 18M active sellers and 1.5B listings on any given day, eBay cannot possibly "proactively stop" anyone.  There isn't enough manpower, expertise, or time to do it.  Thus, the MBG, both to protect buyers and to alert eBay to problem sellers through use of the MBG.

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[w00dst0ck2703]

There’s no manpower needed except the initial coding.  There are plenty of proactive coding steps (such as IP tracking - users who are making multiple accounts, items being listed vastly under market value - which is easily coded etc etc etc)  that could be taken aside from INAD, which I’ve obviously already filed to include reporting the ad, as well as through paypal.

[maxine*j]

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@w00dst0ck2703 wrote:

There’s no manpower needed except the initial coding.  There are plenty of proactive coding steps (such as IP tracking - users who are making multiple accounts, items being listed vastly under market value - which is easily coded etc etc etc)  that could be taken aside from INAD, which I’ve obviously already filed to include reporting the ad, as well as through paypal.

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What "initial coding" would that be, that could determine that something listed is a counterfeit item?

As for reporting items, what if the report is from a rival seller trying to kill the competition, or from someone unqualified to make a determination, or from someone with a personal grudge? The list of spurious reasons for reporting is long. 

If you were a seller, how you would react if you had listings pulled by eBay based on nothing more than a report by an anonymous person, whose knowledge or motives remain unknown to eBay and to you?

Hundreds of thousands of things are misrepresented on eBay every day, sometimes innocently and sometimes intentionally.  You can't police this place, nor can eBay, even if it wanted to.

I'm not defending or justifying fakes and fakers.  I'm just stating the reality.  Probably Oog the caveman sold Moog the caveman phony precious rocks for his collection.  It's a reality that I don't believe will change.

We can only hope that more buyers educate themselves, learn to buy from reliable sellers, file INAD reports when they receive misrepresented items, get over the notions that there are free lunches and deals too good to be true.

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[w00dst0ck2703]

I already listed one of the ways, which is a real time market value of certain goods, like precious metals for example.  It’s very easily coded, and fakes like these tend to be under market value.  It would not automatically deny someone the ability post it, but rather flag the post as potential scam for review by a human, or at the very least put a tag on the item warning buyers when eBay coding sees for example a user from China (a known origin country of fake goods) who’s entire selling history is electronics, and all of a sudden they have listed precious American tender under market value.  

They could also make the origin location visible before clicking on the ad, as well as put it at the very top of the page and easily seen. Right now you have to scroll down all the way at the bottom of the page to the shipping portion, and it’s quite easy to just scroll right past it.

There is no full proof answer, but to claim they can’t do anything to improve people’s chances of not getting scammed is disingenuous.   There are ALWAYS ways to improve. 

[ms.rodriguez*]

I can videotape myself getting any box out of the mail box and opening up a rock.  There is NO video that exists of the package being videotaped the entire time from when the seller packed and shipped it and you getting it out of the mail box.  Therefore, your video is worthless.  It does not proof anything.   

If you had taken a photo of the shipping label and printed it up. You can slap it on any sealed box and put it in the mailbox.  And then you start the tape of getting the box and opening it up and discovering a fake coin.  See what I mean.  A video proves nothing unless it was done showing the ENTIRE JOURNEY from when the seller packed and shipped.  Heck, maybe the post office opened it up and swapped out the item and put in a fake.   I'm sorry that this happened to you. I know that you are a good , honest person.  

Just open an item not described case.  If everyone that this seller would do this, that seller will eventually be suspended with so many returns.  But like I told you in an email,  if they are in China, within minutes, they have a new ebay account since IP addresses are private in China.

[stephenmorgan]

You need to report this to the United States Secrete Service.

https://www.secretservice.gov/investigation/counterfeit

If they choose to investigate they may give eBay some directives on how to deal with all the counterfeit money being sold thru their web-site.

They may not do anything because these counterfeit coins are going to collectors and are not flooding the market in a manner that will devalue the dollar.

[stephenmorgan]

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@w00dst0ck2703 wrote:

I had an Army buddy about 15 years ago get shipped some counterfeit items while we were deployed and the FBI investigated him and threatened to strip his security clearance. 

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This was a big problem in South Korea.  Counterfeit watches and purses were in abundance.  The USPS had warnings all over their Post Office of all the known counterfeit brands you were not allowed to ship thru them and the penalties if you were caught shipping or receiving.

[maxine*j]

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@w00dst0ck2703 wrote:

I already listed one of the ways, which is a real time market value of certain goods, like precious metals for example.  It’s very easily coded, and fakes like these tend to be under market value.  It would not automatically deny someone the ability post it, but rather flag the post as potential scam for review by a human, or at the very least put a tag on the item warning buyers when eBay coding sees for example a user from China (a known origin country of fake goods) who’s entire selling history is electronics, and all of a sudden they have listed precious American tender under market value.  

They could also make the origin location visible before clicking on the ad, as well as put it at the very top of the page and easily seen. Right now you have to scroll down all the way at the bottom of the page to the shipping portion, and it’s quite easy to just scroll right past it.

There is no full proof answer, but to claim they can’t do anything to improve people’s chances of not getting scammed is disingenuous.   There are ALWAYS ways to improve. 

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There are currently 89,000 listings on eBay for "gold coin," 490,000 for "silver coin" and 150,000 for "currency."  Let's say 5% of those 594,000 listings are flagged by your program. 

How many especially trained persons would it take to get those 29,700 listings vetted within, say, 24 hours of their being listed?  And how can they reliably assess authenticity based on the photographs in the listings?  Evidently you could not tell just from a photo what you were getting.

As for eBay tagging any seller's merchandise as possibly counterfeit that would not be lawful, so you can forget that.

Remember, eBay already has this blanket disclaimer in the Terms of Use which every eBay buyer and seller agrees to:

"... while we may help facilitate the resolution of disputes through various programs, eBay has no control over and does not guarantee the existence, quality, safety or legality of items advertised; the truth or accuracy of users' content or listings; the ability of sellers to sell items; the ability of buyers to pay for items; or that a buyer or seller will actually complete a transaction or return an item."

http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/user-agreement.html

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[w00dst0ck2703]

I feel like you’re just arguing to argue at this point.  You have no idea what you’re talking about.

Take care.

[kensgiftshop]

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@w00dst0ck2703 wrote:

Except the people selling it are doing so from overseas, and I’m here in the United States where it’s actually a felony and I can be prosecuted 🤦🏻‍

I’m not shipping counterfeit currency back to the scammers, period.  

Eventually I will be able to speak with an American at eBay to escalate it.

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You didn't sell it, you're just returning it to the seller.

If you want refunded, you'll have to ship it back, if the seller wants it returned.

[kensgiftshop]

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@w00dst0ck2703 wrote:

My neighbor dropped the coin and dented it, so I decided to cut it in half. 

They are silver plated brass so no, an acid test would not have shown them to be fake.  It was actually even simpler than that, they had to cast them much thicker to achieve the desired weight.

I don’t care about the money in all honesty, it’s a matter of principle that eBay invites this kind of rampant fraud.

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If you're not worried about a refund, turn it in to your local police department.

[inhawaii]

You've been given good advice and what your options are.

Do with it what you want.

Good luck.