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Fraudulent Advertising
How can I speak to a human at eBay?
When a seller posts a picture and the item in the picture is NOT what you are buying, it's fraud. When a person selling on eBay posts a picture and writes "read description", this does not exonerate the seller from false advertising. eBay's "bots" are not recognizing the blatant fraud, even when reporting.
Federal law (15 U.S.C. § 52), which the FTC enforces, defines a false advertisement as:
Any advertisement that is misleading in any material respect
This includes both:
Explicit false statements, and
Implied claims that mislead consumers, even if the advertiser didn’t intend to deceive.
I've reported two posts in a row where eBay's "Ai" didn't find anything wrong. Let me know if you too have been frustrated and see if we can find someone at eBay to listen.
mudshark61369
Mentor9 months ago@molloji ,
If you receive an item that is not as advertised, you can file a dispute for Not As Described, and the seller will have to pay the return shipping cost and send you a return shipping label, or issue a full refund without you having to return it. No matter what they post as their Returns policy.
That is about as far as ebay or other online 3rd party seller sites can go.
You can learn how that works by reading the info in the link below.
https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/ebay-money-back-guarantee-policy/ebay-money-back-guarantee-policy?id=4210
eburtonlab
Mentor9 months ago@molloji
Misrepresented or counterfeit items are not allowed to be listed on eBay at all. No one is authorized to sell counterfeit items or to misrepresent what they are selling. That fact alone does not stop some people from trying to sell such things, however.
The problem is that unscrupulous or uninformed sellers can list one thing and then actually deliver something else.
It is not always possible to look at a listing and know in advance exactly what, if anything, the seller intends to deliver. For one thing, a scammer can simply copy a listing from a genuine seller, using a genuine photo of a genuine item. Without looking at the specific item in question, eBay cannot know whether a seller's description is accurate or not.
Except for a few specific categories of items that go through authentication, eBay never sees what the seller ships or the what the buyer receives, so there is nothing for eBay to check unless someone complains about what was received by invoking eBay's money back guarantee.
Sellers are responsible for the descriptions they provide, and buyers should not assume that eBay screens the listings in advance.
As long as counterfeits exist and there are folks trying to sell them, buyers will still have to be on the lookout for them, and avoid deals that are obviously too-good-to-be-true, whether they are being sold by accounts registered overseas or by domestic sellers wittingly or unwittingly buying counterfeits from overseas to sell here.
Buyers that doubt their ability to distinguish a genuine article from a counterfeit one should only consider purchasing from trustworthy sellers that have an established reputation for delivering exactly what was described, and should avoid deals that are too-good-to-be-true, or deals that are offered by inexperienced sellers that might disappear soon after the transaction is made, or else be prepared to get items authenticated by trusted sources within thirty days to be able to take advantage of eBay's money back guarantee.