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Is eBay doing anything about rampant MicroSD fraud?
With the extreme shortage of memory cards and the sharp increase in price the number of blatant frauds on eBay have become simply incredible. Just searching for MicroSD you'll find dozens of listings for Chineesium brand cards with absolutely, to the point of being absurd, pricing; $14 for 1TB, etc. And the listings say hundreds if not thousands sold. (And that's just the Chinese cards that found an unregistered brand name by letting a duck walk across the keyboard. Branded cards for 1/3rd or less of market are just as plentiful.)
The accounts are either hijacked, or purchased, as most of them are well-reviewed sellers.
I've reported a few, only to have eBay spit back:
"We looked into your report and didn’t find the listing to be in violation of our policy. This determination was made using automation or artificial intelligence."
While I do hope your AI costs the company millions, the problem is anyone buying these frauds is already too tech-illiterate to know they're being scammed. Given the weeks it takes for a product to arrive from Chyna, at best they receive a chip of unusable plastic that they can identify as non-working immediately. The rest of the time if actual fake media is sent then there is even more time needed for the sucker to realize that their entire vacation of photos didn't actually save anything. The seller is going to be getting their funds disbursed and most of the customers won't be eligible for any sort of eBay-funded refund.
Rampant, blatant. And eBay is profiting off it with their percentage of every sale.
I'd argue they're complicit, ignoring the Chinese because all of the money they make off fraud. Amazon has the same problem, which has been brought to their attention for many years as well. And they've done nothing either. Because they still get that 13% when that 30 days are up.
And I can't even send an email to anyone, having to resort to a public discussion forum and hoping an actual eBay employee sees it. Reporting listings is tedious (and I'm not getting paid to do it... though if eBay wants to start offering a bounty we can discuss it.) This is on you guys.
eburtonlab
Mentor8 months ago@emustation
Folks that want to find fraudulent listings can find them if they look. Scammers will always be able to put up new scam listings faster than eBay can take them down.
Folks that want to find genuine items from real sellers can find those as well.
There are probably a few listings in the middle that cannot easily be classified one way or the other.
Every time eBay has to refund someone that has been defrauded by a scammer, if eBay cannot take the money back from the scammer, that likely costs eBay an amount equal to the profit eBay makes from twenty legitimate sales of similarly-priced items. If eBay could have pressed a button and made all the scammers go away, eBay would have done so long ago, even if pressing that button cost eBay millions of dollars.
As a buyer, skip over the obvious "too good to be true" scams and the borderline sellers that are too new to evaluate properly; look for reputable sellers that have been selling the same sorts of things for a long time and that have developed a reputation worth protecting, and buy from those sellers.
An experienced seller that has been selling for a while and has been getting good feedback selling real SD cards is unlikely to suddenly decide to just throw that hard-earned reputation away by selling counterfeit SD cards.