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Is it possible for sellers to fake their feedback ratings?
There are several sellers (in Japan) offering the same product (it is actually the same item - a used guitar) at various prices & they all have like 95+% ratings, but they don't seem to answer any emails asking for further info/pictures, so it seems like they are fraudulent, but their ratings would say otherwise. Anyone have any advice?
5 comments
disneyshopper
Mentor1 year agoIn order for a seller to receive positive feedback, a sale has to be made. The buyer may not have paid but feedback can be left. If you suspect something wonky is happening, look at the buyers feedback left. You can probably save on the postage by purchasing from a seller located in the USA.
eburtonlab
Mentor1 year ago@je-896242
Typically such listings -- particularly for expensive, unique items very often found in Japan -- are put up by professional brokers that do not actually possess the item in question. If the item is purchased through such a listing, the broker will then attempt to purchase the original and arrange to ship overseas to the eBay buyer.
Scammers also use the same basic technique, except the scammers do not actual buy or ship anything.
You can usually tell if the seller is a broker or scammer by examining feedback. Brokers tend to have a lot of feedback for selling such items, with possibly a few negatives or neutrals for cancelled orders (when the broker was unable to obtain the item and it was sold elsewhere). Scammers have little or no feedback for major sales at all -- or possibly feedback for sales of keychains or trinkets to build a false history -- at least until the negatives start rolling in once the scam item delivery dates begin to slip.
While it is against eBay policy for a seller to list an item not in the seller's possession (or under contract to the seller in the case of a drop shipper), eBay does little or nothing to seek out such listings in advance or to prevent them unless there are problems reported by buyers.
To answer your title question, it is possible to use a straw purchase to generate fake feedback, but this winds up being very expensive for large purchases, since eBay will claim its fee percentage of the total transaction even if the transaction is a straw purchase that the seller makes from himself. For inexpensive purchases of things like keychains -- or private listings where the item cost is not displayed -- fake feedback is more feasible. That is one reason why positive feedback for private listings or for inexpensive items should be appropriately discounted when deciding how trustworthy a seller is.
je-896242
OP1 year agoThank you for your reply, it was very helpful. So I looked through one of the seller's feedbacks & a few of them show the ebay item number, but when i advanced search (sold items) for those numbers, it never finds any results. So I did a normal product search and set the filter to "Sold Items" and did a sold items search for one of those item numbers it did show up. So to me this would seem to be some kind of indication of potential fraud, no? TIA
je-896242
OP1 year agoSome further research...
Thank you for your reply, it was very helpful. So I looked through one of the seller's feedbacks & a few of them show the ebay item number
but when i advanced search (sold items) for those numbers
it never finds any results
So I did a normal product search and set the filter to "Sold Items"
and did a sold items search for one of those item numbers it did show up
So I looked at the seller of that item's feedback & all the feedbacks had the products listed and they are linked to the listing pages
So to me this seems to be an of indication of potential fraud, no? TIA
eburtonlab
Mentor1 year agoIf an item number appears in a feedback comment description without a link, that usually indicates a listing that has ended more than ninety days ago and has been removed from the site. This is normal. Notice those comments in your first photo have a "Past year" note at the top -- as opposed to "Past month" or "Past six months" as shown in the last photo -- indicating that the feedback is from more than six months ago.
Only items that have sold and ended in the last ninety days (or that are multiple quantity listings that are still active) have active links in the feedback.
If you are interested in buying from an eBay seller in Japan that appears to be a broker, and if you see multiple listings of the same item, you may be better off choosing the seller with the highest feedback number or the highest feedback percentage among sellers with at least three or four digit feedback. Avoid sellers with less than a hundred feedback ratings if you are purchasing expensive items and you have a choice of sellers, particularly if that seller has feedback primarily for buying or selling inexpensive trinkets.