EBay Fraud Avoidance For Buyers And Sellers
Protect yourself from ebay fraud in your Internet trading activities. Repair your credit report and learn what steps to take if seller goods fail to be delivered to you.Ebay Fraud.. Where Auctions Fail
The popularity of online auction sites .. and getting the right deal and price attracts good and bad people into the trading action.
* Where You Pay..But No Goods Are Delivered. EBay fraud boils down to willful criminal undertaking to take victims' money yet intentionally scam the public by failing to make required deliveries.
The ebay fraud internet controls are essentially third party verifications such as a record of "seller reviews" as rated by actual buyers who have purchased goods from the seller in the past. For most consumers, the sellers' record is a key guide to judge the potential risks of ebay fraud on an auction item.
* Case Of The Too-Good-To-Believe Lap Top. The risk-reward game associated with ebay auction fraud becomes more perilous to the consumer when the product values begin to rise into the hundreds and thousands of dollars.
For example, in a well publicized ebay internet fraud report in the summer of 2003, an Utah based business which had a modest record of auction business on ebay, perpetrated a million dollar fraud by offering laptop computers "at a discount" to $1,000.
Over 1,000 consumers anted up money for these laptops, thinking that they were getting a "great deal", which in fact turned out to be one of the largest auction ebay fraud cases in the history of ebay. The internet based ebay fraud criminals were headed up by one Russell Smith, who allegedly master minded the scam with the clear intention of taking the money and running.
* Consumer Tip - Beware Of Seller Site Endorsements. A related factor in determining the likelihood or risk of ebay auction fraud is whether the seller's site has any institutional third party endorsements regarding performance and fair business practices.
In the laptop ebay fraud crime, the seller's site also contained the Square Trade seller verification logo, explicitly communicating credibility and "this site is OK" to unsuspecting buyers.
As the laptop scam victims eventually shared with ebay's cyber crime investigation unit, each had been induced to buy based on the presumed $1,000 sales guarantee displayed by the Square Trade seller verification insert ad.
However, a bad surprise was experienced by the ebay fraud victims when they learned after the fact that Square Trade's offer was exclusive to the "seller", who received the $1000 protection and not the "buyer" who had been defrauded. As the internet ebay fraud victims group learned the hard way, each of the 1000 victims would received their pro rata share of Square Trade's indemnification offer, which amounted to a measly $10 per victim.
* Ebay Fraud Is A Federal Crime. Ebay fraud on auction items is a serious federal crime since the scam involves use of the phones and internet and inter-state communication network, which is federally regulated. So, in a heartbeat, the fraudster like Russell Smith and his laptop ebay fraud internet scam immediately qualifies for investigation by the FBI and prosecution under the federal wire fraud laws.
* Consumer Reminder - Auctions Are "Open" Markets. Since internet auctions remain an "open" system comprised of willing sellers and buyers working of implicit trust, you cannot entirely insulate yourself from attempted ebay fraud. However, you can go carefully by assessing whatever seller information you can locate. Meanwhile, the operators of ebay continue to undertake system security upgrades in order to de-limit ebay fraud auctions from occurring.
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