Authentic item flagged as fake?

[oddsandendsshop]

Hi everyone,

I have a Cards Against Humanity base set I was selling. It was removed as inauthentic.
I spent some time researching and comparing to known fakes and to the best of my knowledge this is an authentic set. It has the right font on the capital C, It has an "R" mark instead of a TM, and the Kickstarter font is correct. I believe this is a genuine item. Has anyone ever had success disputing this with Ebay?

[rosachs]

In some cases, the Rights Owner may flag the item as inauthentic because, as new, it's supposed to have a warranty or similar.  Since it's unlikely an eBay seller can offer the same, the item gets flagged.

Or you have some companies (I used to work for one) that sell only thru registered agents - and if you're not a registered agent, you're not allowed to sell it.  They can do this by offering the agents a 100% reimbursement for any old stock they need to return.

There are a lot of 'alternate' reasons for a listing to be tagged an 'inauthentic'.  You should have an email contact address for the firm requesting the pull - it's buried in the notice eBay sends telling you why your listing was pulled.  Contact them, politely, and request a reason why they had the listing pulled.  Supposedly, and I've tried but never had it work, if the Rights Owner does not provide the email address, or does not reply to your inquiry, eBay will remove the defect.  Sounds nice, and I'm about 50/50 at work for getting responses from the mfg, but I've never had any of the other defects removed.

-Bob.

[rockystradingpost]

I had a listing VeRO'd -- clothing which I had received directly from the company rep, so I knew it was legit.

I called ebay and was told certain companies just don't want their brand sold on ebay, so this is how it's handled. I didn't bother to call the company.

[toysaver]

.... to the best of my knowledge this is an authentic set. It has the right font on the capital C, It has an "R" mark instead of a TM, and the Kickstarter font is correct

There are far more 'tells' used to determine if anything is authentic than simple counterfeit comparison pictures and information you find online.   For security reasons they are not going to tell you what was the give away.  Attempts to relist can get you banned for life.  

[m60driver]

Cards Against Humanity is notorious about filing counterfeit claims even when the item is genuine.  You just have to learn which brands are aggressive in violating reseller's first sale doctrine rights.  Resistance is futile.

[broto_64]

First I want to advise that once a listing is pulled it is best to not relist at all.

Every case is different, what flags the VERO is anything and everything from the simple and obvious to the convoluted and ridiculous. I have had items removed because I didn't have "(tm)" after the trademarked name of the product (or so I was told), so just for example I could have been selling a NAMEBRAND item and it got pulled because I didn't type it as NAMEBRAND(tm) but again once pulled it is best to not relist at all (not even after corrections are made). Also you would want to contact the manufacturer who is responsible for having pulled your listing and get them to tell you what got the listing flagged, I would do this mostly for preventing similar errors from happening in the future because VERO pulls can have worse consequences with repeat offenses.

Last but not least you should probably know that in most cases VERO is not human, your listing got pulled by a robotic piece of software code that saw some keyword or keyword combination that its data told it to look for. It's not personal, and it is possible the VERO bots are abused or become abusive as they scour the web looking for anything and everything but there's not a whole lot we can do about it. Also some manufacturers are more draconian in their measures, it is sad they are allowed to police their products that we purchased and tell us we can't resell them but that is how it is and once pulled it is best to not relist that item at all, at least not on ebay (and for what its worth Amazon likely isn't a good place to list it either, maybe Facebook or Craigslist might work).

[pjcdn2005]

Posters are suggesting that this was a VERO claim although you didn’t mention that.  Did you receive a message from eBay specifying that the listing was removed by VERO as the rights holder had complained? Or did the message simply say that it was not authentic and that it had been removed?   If that was the case, it might have been removed by a bot, not by VERO but in either case it is not a good idea to relist the item.

If it was a VERO claim there would be information on how to contact the rights holder but even if you have definite proof that the item is authentic contacting them may not help.

[oddsandendsshop]

Yes, thank you for actually listening to what I was saying. It was not a VERO claim. I got a message claiming it to be inauthentic. 

[oddsandendsshop]

I believe this to be the case. I cannot find anything showing this to be inauthentic, and and Ebay rep even replied to me to say they were unable to verify if it was or was not authentic, and that they were not even saying my item was not real by the takedown.

So it's just CAH being an awful company, it appears. 

[oddsandendsshop]

I contacted Ebay, and here was their response:

We can confirm the removal was correct, and was taken down since there wasn't sufficient info in the listing to verify it was genuine. We aren't saying the item isn't real, but we never come in contact with the item so we're only able to go off of the details in the listing. Because we didn't have enough information in the listing to help us determine it was genuine though, this item was originally taken down to help protect your Top-Rated account from further account issues like removals or an account restriction.

We did want to clarify that neither of these removals resulted in further account actions - the items were just taken down and we sent heads-up emails about them, but there weren't any other account actions that took place.

[onefootflippers]

This is an item that you would have cleared all of $8 on.

Put it in a box. A year from now bundle it with something similar and then don't even mention the name of it in the title or listing.