What more can I do to protect other buyers? - UPDATED - they're at it again 28/10/06

Pennywise

I had the misfortune of winning an auction from a dodgy seller a few months ago. Paypal not accepted, cheque cashed, no goods, lies about delivery, eventually delivered two months later, advertised as new but clearly well used and actually broken, poor communication, etc etc.

I reported them for shill bidding which was blatently obvious when I looked back at other items they had sold - in fact, they "sold" very little - most of it was bought by themselves using other IDs and giving themselves good feedback each way. Ebay quickly suspended all the accounts involved - all credit to ebay.

BUT, they've now appeared again using another new identity. There is no doubt it's the same person - same items being sold, remarkably similar wording in descriptions, etc. I have reported them twice to ebay, giving details of their previous identities and item numbers, but Ebay havn't done anything this time.

They are selling 17 items, one for £750 and the others will sell for probably between £25 and £100 each, so the figures aren't small. I desperately want to help other prospective bidders avoid being conned like I was, but what else can I do?

jonnyb

you could post his ebay id (not sure if that breaks board rules), or maybe the item numbers.
then other members can have a look, and maybe he'll get hit by the good guys, like this one :

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=245945

read the thread and check the itme number and the seller's feedback

frivolous_fay

You can continue to report the shilling. If you tried to warn the buyers you'd be guilty of auction interference.

frivolous_fay

Make sure you report all the IDs involved.

Pennywise

Yes, I've reported all the id's - three times now - and still ebay havn't done anything.

This is driving me mad.

They are selling items that I have traced back to when they bought them using another id - items that were bought as second hand and/or damaged and they're selling them as new.

They had negatives in their feedback under the previous ids.

There must be a way to stop people being conned. I'd really like to contact the bidders to give them the information I have so at least they can make up their own mind, but I suppose ebay could suspend me for breaking their rules, then I'd lose my 100% feedback record.

soolin

There is a way for people to avoid being conned, read the feedback see what it says and who has left it. Both Ebay and Martin himself in his ebay 'how to' say that you need to look at more than just feedback, look at where it is from and why they have it.

A new seller with no paypal and selling high end goods he is not likely to sell much anyway as experienced users would see that as a problem anyway.

Soo

Pennywise

soolin wrote:

A new seller with no paypal and selling high end goods he is not likely to sell much anyway as experienced users would see that as a problem anyway.

13 out of 17 items have bids on them, totalling £160 and there are a few days left on each auction. Some of these items will sell for around £50. Many of the bidders have high feedback scores so they are experienced.

Surely your advice can't be that the bidders are at fault for bidding on someone with no feedback and no paypal. Where is the buyer protection? How can ebay simply ignore this when the facts are spoon-fed to them?

I was conned by this person - they had plenty of good feedback, but it was only afterwards when I realised the feedback was from items they had bought and all but a couple of the feedback for their sales were sales to themselves under other identities.

Is my only option really just to stand back and watch others being scammed?

I'm seriously considering getting a new ebay identity and contacting the sellers to give them the facts so at least they can make an informed decision.

soolin

Pennywise wrote:

Surely your advice can't be that the bidders are at fault for bidding on someone with no feedback and no paypal. Where is the buyer protection? How can ebay simply ignore this when the facts are spoon-fed to them?

.

Yes I do believe that buyers owe it to themselves to take reasonable precautions. Would you honestly give a bloke in a pub £100 on the promise of goods a few days later purely on the basis that the pub is a 'good one?' I wouldn't think so, why therefore am I wrong in suggesting that people need to look after themselves on ebay?

There is buyer protection with ebay and I was rather assuming you had gone through that route, if not start an ebay claim. It will cost you an admin fee of £15 and there is an upper limit of £105 that can be claimed back.

Soo

Alikay

About 18 months ago my son got ripped off by one of these creeps. He kept opening new ebay accounts each time he got chucked off, and we kept reporting him. He had various email accounts, listed his location as different places (eg by village, town,county or general area). The one thing he never changed was the identical format of his auctions/item descriptions etc. We just reported him each time, followed up within a few days if nothing happened and 3 times (down to us) his account was closed down.
In the end we just gave up -his persistance was amazing! If only he could have channelled that determination into an honest and legit profession, the world would be a better place!

Pennywise

soolin wrote:

There is buyer protection with ebay and I was rather assuming you had gone through that route, if not start an ebay claim. It will cost you an admin fee of £15 and there is an upper limit of £105 that can be claimed back.Soo

I did that but only got £10.01 back as it also excludes the postage paid (I paid £10 extra P&P to cover special delivery but they sent it standard second class 2 months later!) and I also bought several items at the same time of smaller amounts which were below their protection limit, so basically only got £10 for the one item that cost £25.01 and nothing for everything else I paid.

Surely ebay logs the IP addresses and can check for multiple IDs using the same IP address to stop this sort of thing happening?

smartie1976

Get his ID on here, and we'll report him as well.