Legality and technical feasibility of sharing blocked buyers list

[sagemontco]

Just reeling from another lost $500 from a scam. Thinking about how to avoid future losses, the sort of impossible situation eBay is in trying to tell who is scamming who. It occurred to me that I have a network of a few sellers I trust, each with their own blocked buyer list. What is to prevent us from sharing those lists to cut down the losses, does it violates eBays policies? Is it technically feasible to modify the BBL with the eBay API? Are there other legal entities that might have an issue?

Anybody have thoughts on this?

[a_c_green]

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@sagemontco wrote:

Just reeling from another lost $500 from a scam.

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Sorry to hear that. What happened?

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@sagemontco wrote:

 It occurred to me that I have a network of a few sellers I trust, each with their own blocked buyer list. What is to prevent us from sharing those lists to cut down the losses, does it violate eBays policies?

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Well, no, but: Ocean, meet Teaspoon. There are far too many potential scammers out there for one collective BBL to make a difference, unless your collective consists of all the sellers within a narrowly-defined niche market, perhaps.

[vintage-camerastuff]

I don't see any sale on this site where you sold anything near $500.   However if you purchased something for $500 you can always return for refund.

[kensgiftshop]

As a seller, I found the best way to cut down on losses is not to list items that attract scammers.

[luckythewinner]

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@sagemontco wrote:

Anybody have thoughts on this?

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I do not think it is illegal to share usernames of buyers who have scammed you.

But I suspect it would be against eBay policy to share the personal information about those buyers, like names and addresses.

If you sell in a niche where you and these other sellers you trust are likely to run into the same buyers, I can see that this might help bit. Otherwise, it might not be worth the effort. 

But it would not be inconceivable that one of these 'trusted' sellers might take advantage of the rest of you by falsely reporting his best customers as 'scammers' in order to get an advantage over you.

[fbusoni]

Anybody have thoughts on this?

Can you share what happened?  Maybe some here can offer advice so it won't happen anew.

BBLs would fill up far too quickly with the IDs of people who may or may not be purchasing in the same categories in which I sell.  (As @a_c_green notes.)

What WOULD be interesting to see is if there were any IDs that were common to multiple BBLs.

Although perhaps eBay has already thought of that and has those individuals on a special watchlist.

(Yes, hope springs eternal, as they say.)

[stainlessenginecovers]

a.) you only get 5000- so would easily be too many

b.) my list, for example- is for a different category than what another person might be selling or doing and therefore, may be for a different reason (shoppers that 'argue about fitment' 'refund' 'neut/neg feedback' 'attempted ChargeBack' 'send lowball UNSOLICITED offers' (I don't have BO) etc. ) 

[ten_o_nine]

Scammers are born every day, so it's impossible to create a list of senior scammers and newborns.

[sagemontco]

We sold 5 7400s a month or so ago and the customer claimed that they were bios locked, submitted a return for 3 units and only actually shipped one back. I messaged them, hoping they would respond and be reasonable or at very least incriminate themselves, nothing. So I will have to report them in a couple hours, sure, based on other sellers experience on this site, that I will lose the price of the two laptops that weren't actually returned. The computer I got back for the record was locked to the domain of the previous SSDs owner, we bought the SSDs on ebay, switching the SSD out fixed it, this was a new problem for me.

[sagemontco]

Changing what we sell is an interesting idea. We are a career readiness program so computers are ideal because the value of something is easy to evaluate, it doesn't rely on decades of history with something. It's also easier, as a non-profit, to find laptops in bulk, rather than doing alot of driving around thrift stores etc.

[sagemontco]

Seller requested a return for 3 then only returned one from a lot of 5 laptops.

I am thinking of a list specific to sellers of used laptops. I know that is still an enormous number of scammers. WRT it ever happening again. We are focusing on improving the quality of our posts, we are increasing the prices a little bit and will likely not be selling in bulk again if we can help it, specifically we won't be accepting bulk offers and we will be breaking our bulk lots down a little more based on battery health, specific cosmetic categories etc.

[sagemontco]

I'd want to include obvious, illegal type fraud for the category I am in, some of the stuff that has happened to our org is 100% criminal activity. eBays policies and TOS protects these criminals, I don't think eBay does it on purpose by they are making alot of the blind, ineffective, tone deaf type policies and decisions that corporations make.

The 5000 limit is real, I was thinking of a browser addon that would scan an orders page for usernames and add some type of icon next to the user name that the user could roll over to click on and see a list of complaints, fraud $ amounts etc.  

[sagemontco]

We are a workshop for survivors of human trafficking, I am a volunteer of three years, I have never made a dollar on ebay for myself. There are many other "Mission driven" organizations around that get scammed in a similar way everyday. I think there should also be a way to build trust with other sellers, from an invitation only type model, or a paid model, or something. 

[isaiah53-57]

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@sagemontco wrote:

Just reeling from another lost $500 from a scam. Thinking about how to avoid future losses, the sort of impossible situation eBay is in trying to tell who is scamming who. It occurred to me that I have a network of a few sellers I trust, each with their own blocked buyer list. What is to prevent us from sharing those lists to cut down the losses, does it violates eBays policies? Is it technically feasible to modify the BBL with the eBay API? Are there other legal entities that might have an issue?

Anybody have thoughts on this?

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Sorry to hear of the crime against you...

I think a lot of scammers have many accounts and can create accounts at will - No vetting, no credit card numbers or payment accounts to get started that can be used for reference - My guess is ease of sign-up is designed to keep active user numbers up and potential buyers rolling in regardless of quality and viability. That makes it hard to keep track of them, so it would be easy for many scammers to get by sellers sharing blocked buyers lists. But anything you can do to protect yourself may help.

We dont list here anymore due to buyer fraud and theft - Our last criminal case of theft was from a buyer who had a years worth of false positive feedback for the same scam they pulled on us - We talked to many sellers about filing reports against them in the hopes of getting the thief(s) booted off the site - We were shocked to find that a large number of sellers over the previous 90 days had already reported them and who knows how many had before that, yet the thief(s) continued to steal with impunity. Many months more down the road and they were still there scamming - they may still be even now - Already disgusted with the site for many reasons over many years, our thoughts about the site soured dramatically at that point leading us to decide it was untenable to continue doing business with them under their current TOS.

[sagemontco]

Isaiah53-57 where did you end up selling besides eBay? For the amount we lose to fraud we are close some months to being able to have a lease for a storefront. I really don’t want to do that for many reasons.