Chinese FAKE Pandas Not Real Silver BEWARE

[thecoinguyfrommichigan]

Dear eBay Community,

I may not be the first and definitely will not be the last. I saw one of those too-good-to-be-true silver deals on ebay.  I put in a "feeler" bid far less than spot, just to see that there would be the usual automatic bid that would cancel mine. To my shock my bid stayed the highest and i won 5 OZ of "Pure silver" for $63 (And that was over a month ago when silver was slightly higher.) My fishy antennae was activated and I began to do some research which revealed in no time that the coins were fakes. They did not have the denomination stamped on them and that was a dead giveaway. I contacted the seller immediately and asked if the coins are genuine, stating that the listing was misleading and that if they were not real -I DID NOT WANT THEM.  The seller was gracious and offered a no strings attached cancellation, while CLAIMING that the coins were indeed real. In broken English, probably google translated from Chinese, the seller said things like "My project is real", and "they are real panda coins" all phrases which may have been honest and just poorly translated or may have been cleverly designed to look that way while avoiding answering the bottom line ARE THESE TRULY .999 SILVER. I don't care if they are Pandas - i can see that, i don't care that they are real- i wasn't expecting to receive an imaginary coin in exchange for my 63 dollars.    After making the correct decision i asked the seller to cancel the order despite the fact that they were real. He agreed and i was happy. 

I began to investigate further and found that this guy had been around on eBay for a year and had a feedback score of some 200 or so and 100% rating. Pretty impressive - until you consider that for an ENTIRE YEAR this guy had sold little glass penises and other weird **bleep** mostly for a couple bucks and most of his feedbacks were from the same user names. 

It is not hard to imagine the scenario what may be going on in China right now. A new user creates an eBay account. He buys 250 dumb trinkets and sells each for $1.00 to a bunch of previously set up eBay users. He then leaves glowing feedbacks for himself. He also gets the occasional stranger who stumbled upon his listing and adds to the mix of feddbacks. A clever trick to sell erotica, so you can attract more bored, horny guys to your store. After a year or so, you roll out the Pandas all made of 0% silver and list hundreds of them over the course of a few weeks. Here is the clincher- delivery time from China is about three weeks. Worst case scenario you have three weeks of selling before your first negative feedbacks begin to pour in. You have the added bonus of the uneducated customer who gets his/her coin and says wow  it is beautiful and puts it away without ever bothering to check if it is genuine. They leave more feedbacks. You have now made a couple hundred sales in those three weeks to a month before the S**t hits the fan. Potential earnings of 10K-25K. Retreat to your hideout, shut down your eBay name and start again (with another account that you started a year ago.) 

This is exactly what is going on andn eBay knows it. I propose that eBay does something about this. It is not my job to figure out the algorithms that can be used to determine a users credibility per the item being sold, but i am sure that the count of distinct users who left feedback and the categories in which they were left could go a long way in making a feedback tell a much fuller story and save people hundreds of dollars.

If you have been a victim of this- chime in- help save another newbie from this disturbing trend.