Scam Warning

RFW

ScambusterNumber1 wrote: »

Well that's the thing. More than a disgrace, I aim to prove in a court of law that it is ILLEGAL.

If banks can be punished for knowingly selling PPI, I believe eBay can be punished for knowingly listing 'sales of fraud'. I know their legal dept will say that eBay can/will hide behind the breech of rules thing (when a financial transaction takes place outside of eBay) but the fact that such a transaction can be publicly seen every single day (there were 34 yesterday alone) is not compatible with such an escape-clause.

If anybody reading this is a victim of an eBay-related scam, I would like them to contact me. Similarly, if anyone reading this knows (of) someone who is a victim of an eBay-related scam, I would like them to contact me.

Reporting eBay scams is all well and good - I've been doing it for over 8 years - but the time is long overdue to do something much more decisive, something that will all but wipe it out.

If I can find a group of people who have all fallen victim to eBay scams, I believe I can make the biggest difference so far.

Good luck with that.

I can list an item valued at a few thousand pounds that I don't have on Ebay any time I like and you are telling me that Ebay are at fault if I do. If they are it would close down every marketplace site and every classified ads newspapers.

Complete the transactions on Ebay as they tell you to and no buyer should lose out, deal off Ebay and they can quite rightly wipe their hands of it.

ScambusterNumber1

RFW wrote: »

Good luck with that

Thank you for your goodwill message.

You might wish to absorb the following extract (unedited) from The Fraud Act:-

Fraud by abuse of position

24. Section 4 provides that the offence will be committed if a person:
occupies a position in which he is expected to safeguard, or not to act against, the financial interests of another person,
dishonestly abuses that position, and
intends by means of the abuse of that position –
to make a gain for himself or another, or
to cause loss to another or to expose another to a risk of loss.

25. Section 4 does not define "abuse" or "position". However regarding the former concept the section states that an omission will be enough for an abuse of position to take place. An example given in the Explanatory Notes is of an "employee who fails to take up a crucial contract in order that an associate or rival company can take it up instead at the expense of the employer".

26. The Law Commission's Report offers some assistance with the "position":
"The necessary relationship will be present between trustee and beneficiary, director and company, professional person and client, agent and principal, employee and employer, or between partners. It may arise otherwise, for example within a family, or in the context of voluntary work, or in any context where the parties are not at arm's length." (para.7.38)

---

Actually I am already aware of the seemingly hopeless chances I have, but that does not mean that chances will not be taken.

I suspect that most people who have been victims of fraud would support such an effort. You appear to represent the overwhelming majority of the population who either shrug their shoulders in apathy as if to say "well, it's not my problem", or point their fingers and laugh at anyone who wants to bring about some sense of moral backbone to our rules of law.

RFW

ScambusterNumber1 wrote: »

You appear to represent the overwhelming majority of the population who either shrug their shoulders in apathy as if to say "well, it's not my problem", or point their fingers and laugh at anyone who wants to bring about some sense of moral backbone to our rules of law.

You inferred a lot from one paragraph.
As mentioned elsewhere on this thread victims often fall victim by the fraudster preying on their greed. If they break rules by dealing off Ebay, why should Ebay be culpable?
If you go to court Ebay will say they protect their customers who have transactions on Ebay, I don't understand why you believe they should protect buyers who don't do that or even how they profit from it, both of which you would have to prove in court.
It seems you want every marketplace to vet every seller and every item before it is listed. I'm happy with the status quo, with maybe a few tweaks. The protections that are in place on Ebay (I have no idea about AutoTrader) are good enough.
Quite frankly this isn't my problem, I couldn't fall for such a scam and whilst I have some sympathy for anyone who does they should bear a lot of the responsibility for at least being naive.

ScambusterNumber1

RFW wrote: »

why should Ebay be culpable?

Because they are repeatedly (as in several times every single day) in breech of The Fraud Act. To help you to understand, I have very slightly modified a rule of law:-

"An offence will be committed if eBay occupies a position in which the company is expected to safeguard, or not to act against, the financial interests of another person"

The modification is simply to replace the words 'a person' with 'eBay'. The rest of it is law, not my opinion.

RFW wrote: »

I don't understand why you believe they should protect buyers who don't do that or even how they profit from it, both of which you would have to prove in court

Easy. I have more data on this subject than you could possibly know. For example, eBay take, on average, about 6 hours to remove a reported scam. They could take 6 minutes, but they don't. And as one hacked-account victim told me less than half-an-hour ago, he has just been billed £2.82 for listing something that was actually posted by scammers. When a hacked account owner removes a scam listing him/herself, he or she may be charged. This generates commodity known as 'money'. Meanwhile, if or when eBay delete a listing because they agree that it is a scam, no charges are applied. Remember, I have hundreds upon hundreds of itemised scam data just for the month of May 2013 - you really have no idea how deeply familiar I am with this topic. It follows that - despite this being only a secondary issue to the primary charge of breeches of The Fraud Act 2006 - eBay can very easily be proven to be generating an income from improperly applied listing fees. I expect the majority of hacking victims try to recover those costs, but equally I expect a large number do not because the sum is usually too small to waste the time over. But if we were to take just yesterday as an example, when 34 scams from hacked accounts were listed, it could be estimated that this would have generated about £100 in improper (non-applicable) listing fees. And this problem has been going on for at least a decade, over 4000 days. That's £400,000 from those fees alone - and it's absolutely insignificant compared to the losses that actual victims of fraud have incurred over that period. My own guess, based on the eBay UK website, is that scammers earn about £50,000 a day - and even if I'm wrong, what's certain is that the true amount most definitely IS significant.

RFW wrote: »

The protections that are in place on Ebay (I have no idea about AutoTrader) are good enough

With respect: That is rubbish, ridiculous and simply incorrect.

RFW wrote: »

Quite frankly this isn't my problem

That much is plainly evident.

Compare your sentiment with the following text that I just received a minute ago from a hacked account victim:-

"You should get paid for doing what you're doing, it's amazing you're doing such a thing and you should take them to court - it's not right how they [the scammers] can just hack accounts and do what they're doing. I am so grateful, thank you"

Still, it takes all sorts.

real1314

ScambusterNumber1 wrote: »

"An offence will be committed if eBay occupies a position in which the company is expected to safeguard, or not to act against, the financial interests of another person"

Ebay does take responsibility if the financial interests are progressed through Ebay.
If they are not - i.e via bank transfers - which Ebay specifically advises against, how can Ebay be held liable for the actions of individuals outside Ebay?

Ebay, nor any other medium, cannot assure that goods advertised exist and will be supplied. It's not Ebay's fault that people are prepared to essentially send "electronic cash" without taking proper precautions.

RFW

ScambusterNumber1 wrote: »

Because they are repeatedly (as in several times every single day) in breech of The Fraud Act. To help you to understand, I have very slightly modified a rule of law:-

"An offence will be committed if eBay occupies a position in which the company is expected to safeguard, or not to act against, the financial interests of another person"

They don't do that though. The security is very clearly there if rules are followed. We frequently see on here how Ebay will take the word of buyers over sellers and refund money to the buyer. They can't refund money if they never see it.

From all you have said they have pulled all the listings you have mentioned, presumably they have to check that some sellers may be genuine before removing and in certain circumstances may be asked to leave listings live for authorities to prosecute fraudsters.

Ebay have helped with many prosecutions over the years, they don't do enough to police the site and some simple things could solve a lot of problems. However if you believe Ebay would sacrifice their reputation for the sake of minimal listing fees then you don't understand much about business

You may be doing honourable work protecting the greedier elements who are keen to 'save a few bob', others aren't that keen. Why are they misled into believing they are getting a good deal? Do they believe there is tax avoidance or buying stolen goods? They will often be the type of people who ask few questions to get something on the cheap. In the words of Mike Skinner, "you can't con an honest john".

frank_potter

RFW wrote: »

They don't do that though. The security is very clearly there if rules are followed. We frequently see on here how Ebay will take the word of buyers over sellers and refund money to the buyer. They can't refund money if they never see it.

From all you have said they have pulled all the listings you have mentioned, presumably they have to check that some sellers may be genuine before removing and in certain circumstances may be asked to leave listings live for authorities to prosecute fraudsters.

Ebay have helped with many prosecutions over the years, they don't do enough to police the site and some simple things could solve a lot of problems. However if you believe Ebay would sacrifice their reputation for the sake of minimal listing fees then you don't understand much about business

You may be doing honourable work protecting the greedier elements who are keen to 'save a few bob', others aren't that keen. Why are they misled into believing they are getting a good deal? Do they believe there is tax avoidance or buying stolen goods? They will often be the type of people who ask few questions to get something on the cheap. In the words of Mike Skinner, "you can't con an honest john".

Is the security really “very clearly” there? I think not.

This is not just a case of victims being gullible, stupid or greedy. It would appear that a significant number of Ebay user accounts are being hacked to facilitate the scams. It is quite possible that even a very astute person could find that their Ebay account had been hacked.

It is possible that each hacked user account is being hacked individually – maybe the users are using easily guessable or obvious passwords for instance. Alternatively the user may have placed too much personal information in the public domain such as on social networking websites – I know people who refuse to use social networking sites for this reason. There are other possibilities here as well.

However a more sinister (hopefully unlikely) possibility is that the criminals have somehow managed to acquire a bulk amount of security information. Security can never be perfect within large companies and organizations. For instance I recall that in 2007 the Nationwide Building Society was fined £1m over a laptop theft security breach.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2007/feb/15/business.accounts

The widespread hacking of user accounts by professional criminals should be of concern to all of us. Unauthorized access to user accounts is the root of the problem and it needs to be prevented.

It would be interesting to hear from some of the people whose user accounts have been hacked.

ScambusterNumber1

Frank - you are clearly very much more familiar with the problem I'm talking about, and you know how big it is.

Yes, it all begins with a hacked account. Over the past few days I've spoken on the phone to a number of Hacked Account Owners (HAO) and as I've grown in confidence (it was a bit weird at first), I've started to ask them some questions in addition to the fundamental task of telling them to delete the scam listing and to change their password. I haven't nailed a good script yet, but basically I ask them if they can remember receiving an email from eBay (or PayPal) recently that in any way made them wonder if it was legitimate. In almost every instance, their response was something like "Well, yes - now you come to mention it, there was something a bit odd the other day". The time span seems, at this early stage of my findings, to be about a week; in other words the hacked account is used within a week. I have absolutely no idea how many the scammers have, but that is their currency of course. With those User IDs and passwords, they print money.

Or at least, they were doing that until about 6 weeks ago. I am in no doubt that their revenue has taken a big hit in the past month or so. No doubt. This is evidenced by their ever-increasing activity, sometimes bordering on panic. Things went bonkers on Monday of this week - unfortunately I was out most of the day and wasn't there to deal with it - and they listed 34 scams in less than 24 hours. As you know, that's heavy. They're all gone now, and it was back to normal levels of business the next day (12) although that in itself is about double the figure of last month. They are rattled, that's for certain.

So this is the thing. Why can't eBay do what I do? I've reported over 200 scam listings and I do a lot more than just report them - I email the HAO, I text them, I phone them, I even post dummy listings to draw attention to the scams. I do what eBay could and should and I have saved unknown victims tens of thousands of ££ in just a few weeks. In most cases, those 'would-have-been-victims' are not aware of this because they simply didn't see that tractor/digger/motorbike (whatever) because it was taken down before they could. It's kind of like removing the ice from a motorway during the night so that's safe to drive on in the morning rush-hour; they might not know how dangerous it would or could have been but for the clean-up operation while they slept.

If I worked officially for eBay, these hack-scams would rapidly become a thing of the past. That's because they're dead easy to find, yet the only person really committed to removing them quickly is me.

ILW

Surely if people stick to the rules and only deal through Ebay, they are fully protected against fraud?

frank_potter

ILW wrote: »

Surely if people stick to the rules and only deal through Ebay, they are fully protected against fraud?

Perhaps not that much protection for those who don't make payment through Paypal.