Ebay community is willing to help prevent fraud and scams.
On the screen for a listed item, there should be a way for community members to alert Ebay that "hey, this might be fraud. you might want to investigate." If enough ebay community members try to point out potential fraud, maybe ebay would investigate and stop some fraud/scams before it happens. Also, for this public forum, "New Message and Select Location and Choose a Board," there could be a specific heading for fraud and scams."
8 comments
kibble-net
·8 months agoYou mean like the REPORT LISTING button that already exists?
ed4333ed
OP8 months agoYes, I could see where a good number of comments would need to be made before ebay would want a real person to investigate. I don't know what that number would be.
Another problem I just started watching for is this. A new (or newer) seller has ok feedback. They list 10 items in 10 auctions that all come up at the same time. Buyers look at the feed back and aren't too concerned. The 10 items sell in the auctions. Seller doesn't deliver products to any of them. 10 Buyers list negative feedback. But too late for these buyers, they all get tracking information to show that items were delivered to their zip codes. I'm seeing this happening in about 20 different listings for Ecoflow Delta Pro products. Different sellers with similar names
valueaddedresource
·8 months ago@ed4333ed BTW, those Ecoflow Delta Pro products are very likely either some form of triangulation fraud like I described above or from your description it sounds like it could also be the equally long-standing "same zip code tracking" scam.
Understand in both cases the issue is not that eBay doesn't know about the problem or can't do anything to stop it - it is well documented they are and have been fully aware of exactly how these scams work for well over a decade at least and they simply choose not to do any more than the bare minimum they are legally held accountable for doing in these scenarios.
stainlessenginecovers
·8 months agoNo way that could or would EVER happen.
With over 2 Billion Listings (2,000,000,000) there are probably 2 Million fraudulent listings (1%) so how many 'experts' will ebay have to hire to 'look at a listing that some yahoo reported' (remember, there are Millions of yahoos out there with nothing better to do as well as Millions of 'competitors' that will gladly 'report' items if the entity took them down).
valueaddedresource
·8 months ago@ed4333ed I applaud your effort but...sad to say, eBay has had many, many chances over the years to leverage the collective knowledge, experience and good will of this community for all kinds of things, including help with fraud investigations and prevention and....they have made it very clear they are simply not interested.
In fact, my own posting here started from trying to do exactly what you are suggesting, bringing eBay's attention to a massive triangulation fraud scheme operating on their site that had hit my then employer to the tune of over $160K in 4 months.
https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Warning-Retail-Arbitrage-Credit-Card-Fraud/td-p/30822324
https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Increasing-instances-of-fraudulent-not-authorized-orders/td-p/30987142
I didn't just post here in the community - I also worked directly with eBay's PROACT (partnering with retailers offensively against crime and theft) department and our dedicated category rep (for reference, the company I worked for was the third largest seller in our category and did over $2M/yr in sales just through eBay at that time.)
I offered to provide eBay a list of over 4,000 tracking numbers they could use to trace back through their internal databases to identify all of the fraudulent (likely hacked/hijacked) accounts involved - and eBay politely but very directly declined.
And that's just one of many examples I could give to illustrate that eBay is not actually concerned with stopping fraud on their platform - they're only concerned with CYA and making sure they cannot be held liable for fraud on their platform.
That's why eBay is heavily involved in lobbying against current congressional efforts to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 as well as several state level legislative and regulatory efforts to hold marketplaces accountable for fraud, counterfeits, dangerous, illegal or stolen goods sold through their sites.
The light bulb moment comes when you consider eBay's incentives.
A.) They make money off of these illicit sales in the form of final value fees, listing fees, ad fees etc.
B.) Every single illicit sale gets counted in eBay's Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) stats reported to Wall Street on quarterly earnings reports and while there's some nuance involved, the basic takeaway is if that number goes up, it's good for the stock price and if it stays stagnant or goes down, it's bad for the stock price.
Importantly, GMV gets counted as soon as a purchase is paid for - and it does not get deducted if that purchase is later canceled, returned for a refund, or refunded via a chargeback or dispute.
Also importantly, if eBay ever had to admit what percentage of their GMV comes from fraud, counterfeits, illegal or stolen goods, it would have a severe negative impact on the stock price which would also likely lead to shareholder lawsuits and/or SEC action.
So as long as the courts and regulators allow marketplaces to be immune from liability, eBay simply has no incentive to do more than minimum viable compliance box checking exercises and a lot of incentive to do everything they possibly can to avoid acknowledging or admitting the actual scope of illegal activity that operates through the platform.
jonathanbrightlight
·8 months agoThere is a ? button in the bottom right, and you can report a listing from there.
The problem is that fraud is not provable prior to a transaction occurring, in probably 99% of cases. Sellers don't advertise that they're going to defraud their customers. So throughout history, crime has been dealt with after it happens, the vast majority of the time.
gone.c-33
·8 months agoThat’s what the report listing is for.
Yes, the reports are first only looked at by AI but when the number of reports for one listing reaches a certain threshold, human eyes look at them.
Being able to just mark any item as potential fraud would be a free for all of sellers marking their competition as such.
soh.maryl
·8 months agoGive this a little more thought because: (a) Let's say I'm a seller and that you and I sell much the same things.
Wouldn't it be easy for me to say to eBay that "hey, this might be fraud. You might want to investigate." regarding the items you're selling? And (b) How many extra employees would eBay need to hire to do this investigating? and (c) Who would ultimately suffer the cost of this?
Furthermore, after I report your coin or your designer purse or your antique jewelry, where do they go from there? Since the only way to authenticate your item would be for eBay to require it to be send t them, how long would that take?