Ever wonder where all those great tool bargains you get on ebay come from?

[Bill Dufour]

I thought pawn shops can not sell items in the original box?
Bill D.

[Mark Hennebury]

Mike.

Ebay stats; https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/ebay-stats/

That's a lot of cash and a lot of transactions moving between people; not sophisticated finance companies, just between the general public.

Maybe I have it all wrong with regards to human nature, but i think that would be prime hunting ground for the predators among us. But maybe that is just me.

In regards social media; a quick search on google with the terms eBay "scammed on eBay " brings up 12,600,000 results. "eBay scams" brings up 48,500,000 results

Search "Stories about ebay scams" returns 1,380,000 results.
Search " News stories about ebay scams" returns 1,840,000 results

Search "Lawsuits against ebay" returns 1,760,000 results

I assume that ebay have worked at increasing security and warning the public, but the threat of scammers will always be there, the opportunities are just too great for them to ignore, and the difficulties of tracking down the scammers, arresting and prosecuting them far to complex to be a deterrent on the world wild web.

You rob a bank, there is a good chance that you will get shot; But you can rob people on-line from thousands of miles away sat on a beach in Hawaii with your laptop while sipping a Pina colada.

Keep your guard up and don't think that just because the company is huge that they have everything under control and your well-being is their top concern..Or that the "justice" system will jump up to right all wrongs.
It has been my experience that when things go wrong and you seek to get it put right..... everyone slams the door in your face.

We don't need eBay to tell us how many people lost money in a transaction. With all the social media sites, that information would get disseminated pretty quickly. Unhappy people are much more likely to complain to the world than happy people are to tell their experience. Once one person starts the story, say on Twitter, others will quickly chime in with their stories.

If there was some real meat there, some journalist would do a story about all the unhappy people on eBay.

Someone with a good lawyer could even bring suit and force eBay to disclose that information.

Mike

[Wade Lippman]

The feedback ratings are an excellent idea to evaluate the integrity of the owner of the account;

Rating are useless. I twice tried to leave bad ratings, only to have ebay tell me they weren't allowed. I guess they were valuable vendors.

[Zachary Hoyt]

I have bought and sold hundreds of things on eBay over the years, I don't sell much now but that is because I am selling new instruments I have made, when I have old instruments to sell eBay is still my place of choice. I sold an old archtop guitar for a friend last spring, the soundboard had collapsed, but some guy in France won the bid on it for over $200. He was happy to get it and my friend was happy to sell it for that much, he said that was more than he had originally paid for it, back when it was still playable. I've had a few bad experiences as a seller, but less than 1% of my total sales over the years and I never lost a significant amount of money. eBay is my first place to check pricing when I need to buy something, though sometimes I find I can get it cheaper elsewhere.
Zach

[Perry Hilbert Jr]

Around here stolen items are hauled 40 or 50 miles away and sold at weekly auction houses. They are purchased cheap at auction then sold on CL. I have seen tools and tool boxes at a nearby auction show up the following day on CL. An acquaintance who owns one of these auctions will not accept items for sale without getting a photocopy of the ID of the consignor, even then once or twice a yea somebody claims stuff consigned to him is stolen. Recently it is wives bringing in the husband's tools and guns as soon as they are separated.

[Jim Koepke]

I have bought and sold hundreds of things on eBay over the years,

Same here with minimal problems and only a couple of dishonest sellers. Mostly it was hidden or undisclosed damage.

Some sellers do not like the buyer being able to get their money back without recourse. My suspicion is if a buy keeps claiming items do not show up they may have problems with making claims. Many sellers use USPS priority packaging which includes insurance. If a buyer claims an item wasn't received the seller can put in a claim. If the buyer is dishonest they may get some free room and board via mail fraud.

Most of my buying and selling on ebay is over. Every once in a while something will appear that is wanted for my shop.

ebay wants the people on both sides of a transaction to be happy. Their business model would fall apart if too many people were dissatisfied.

As far as leaving negative feedback, ebay wants the buyer to first contact the seller with an attempt to rectify the situation before posting negative feedback. There may be a wait before one is allowed to post negative feedback. My recollection is sellers no longer are allowed to post feedback. It has been awhile since my last purchase on ebay.

jtk

[Mark Hennebury]

I think that you can understand that a couple of hundred dollar trades are not as attractive to thieves as items that cost thousands of dollars. I buy and sell machinery, and have seen many scams on ebay, when i purchased a couple of fine woodworking magazines, no one bothered with scamming those. It takes just as much effort to scam $100 as it does to scam $10,000.

[Mike Henderson]

Rating are useless. I twice tried to leave bad ratings, only to have ebay tell me they weren't allowed. I guess they were valuable vendors.

You may know this, but eBay changed their policy on ratings some years ago. The problem was that the seller would not leave feedback until the buyer did and let it be known that if the buyer left negative feedback, the seller would leave negative feedback for the buyer. It was really blackmail.

So what eBay did was institute a policy that if the buyer paid for the item in a reasonable time, the seller could not leave negative feedback for the buyer. The comment was that the primary obligation of the buyer was to pay for the item.

If there was a dispute between the buyer and seller, it was to be referred to the eBay dispute resolution process.

Of course, some buyers could exploit this new policy - and I expect some did. But it was better than the blackmail system that existed earlier.

Mike

[I don't know of any restriction on buyers leaving negative feedback except that you have to contact the seller and give them a chance to respond before leaving negative feedback.]

[Steve Demuth]

I'm not sure what bargains you're talking about - eBay seems like a pretty efficient pricing mechanism, with most similar items settling for a similar, market price.

As for scams - I don't use eBay very often, but I have never encountered any serious problems with verifiable dishonesty, either when buying or selling. A couple of times I've received used items with missing parts or flaws that could have been disclosed, but in those cases I'm reasonably satisfied that the seller didn't understand what they were selling well enough to even know what was missing or damaged. One case, e.g., was a Swedish tapestry loom, shipped disassembled by the sister of a deceased owner. It was missing a couple of components that are important for some uses of the tool, utterly irrelevant for others. No doubt the original owner set them aside, and they didn't get reconnected by the selling sister.

The eBay scams I have seen have originated on Craigslist. People selling high end stuff (tractors, industrial quality tools) with a sob story, need for quick turnaround, and inexplicable desire to use eBay to pay for something they'll ship you upon payment. I actually had an extended email exchange with one such scammer a couple years ago when looking for a tractor. Had one of my guys in cyber security at work track his location down. He was "selling" a John Deere tractor for about 1/3 its market value, ostensibly from a suburban lot in Council Bluffs, IA, but actually from somewhere in Nigeria. Insisted that we use eBay Auto to pay for it, and had a very nicely faked form for the payment. I kinda admired the way he talked my location out of me before disclosing the supposed location of the tractor (it had to be far enough away from me to make a drive out to see it not make sense, but close enough for the CL posting to have made sense), and the professionalism of the fake documentation.

[Kev Williams]

Someone on page 1 mentioned hackers. I ran into one once, found out inadvertently; I found something I wanted to buy (I think it was a laser engraver), price was great, but it wasn't cheap. So I asked the seller a question... I got an email back, looked pretty official, 'seller' answered my questions, including options on how to pay. In the email was a link 'back to the item listing'. The status bar 'confirmed' it was an ebay link. But since I don't like clicking links in emails, I looked for the item listing number in the email, there wasn't one. Because it wasn't cheap and I intended to buy, I took some screen shots of the ad pages and pictures.. After finding the item number in one of the pics, I searched it on ebay. Turns out it didn't exist. The search page screenshot showed the ad sandwiched between 2 similar items, a new search found the same actual items but not the hacker's item between them, or anywhere else. Don't know how he/they managed to insert a bogus ad right on their website, but they obviously were good at it. Still glad I didn't click that link...

And, about 3 months ago I bought what was supposed to be a decent graphics card for one of my computers. Price was very good, but what I got was a Chinese knockoff.

I've bought a few off-the-wall tools off ebay, like last summer I got a gimbal bearing remover/installer tool set, made by a machinist, worked fantastic, but if buying new in the box name-brand tools, I'll usually just hit the store...

[Edwin Santos]

Mike.



In regards social media; a quick search on google with the terms eBay "scammed on eBay " brings up 12,600,000 results. "eBay scams" brings up 48,500,000 results

Search "Stories about ebay scams" returns 1,380,000 results.
Search " News stories about ebay scams" returns 1,840,000 results

Search "Lawsuits against ebay" returns 1,760,000 results

If you put into Google "Ebay is great" it returns 451,000,000 results.

[Mark Hennebury]

That's funny.

You know maybe there are a 100,000,000 trades per day on eBay and only say 10,000 people scammed per day. i don't know , neither do you. Its a great place if you are not one of the ones getting scammed.

If you put into Google "Ebay is great" it returns 451,000,000 results.

[Edwin Santos]

That's funny.

You know maybe there are a 100,000,000 trades per day on eBay and only say 10,000 people scammed per day. i don't know , neither do you. Its a great place if you are not one of the ones getting scammed.

So far I've been pretty lucky. Once I sold a hand plane to someone who claimed they didn't get it. The dispute ended up in the hands of FedEx to investigate which they did. It looked like the superintendent of the apartment building signed for it and from there things got murky so FedEx and I were off the hook and the buyer and his superintendent were left to duke it out.
As far as bad sellers, I'm sure they are out there but like I say, so far I've been lucky, knock on wood. I think it is important to look at both the rating and the number of ratings.

[Mark Hennebury]

Hi Edwin,

There are legitimate buyers and sellers that can be problematic. Misrepresenting stuff, not sending it, missing parts, stuff gets lost, lots of chance for arguments and angry situations that lead to disputes for sure, but that is not what i was referring to; what i was referring to was a totally different issue; The issue of scammers and hackers. Hackers get into legitimate accounts and use without the owners knowledge. they get customers contact info and send phony emails "from" ebay and "sellers" or post photos of equipment they don't have, on the hacked accounts, redirect your emails and funds and disappear. Ebay and the sellers are unaware of whats going on. These are, (a lot of the time) professional organised crime gangs operating from various parts of the world, and they go after big ticket items, Ducati motorcycles, sports cars, machinery etc anything where there is a large amount of money. They don't waste time on $100 items. It's not a dispute situation at all, as when they have your money they disappear, there is no one to argue with. So looking at someones ratings or numbers means you will only be easier to con if the account has been hacked, because you have lowered your guard and have a false sense of security due to the ratings. Like i said this is from my experience many years ago, and hopefully they have tightened things up a lot, and hopefully that kind of stuff doesn't happen any more.

So far I've been pretty lucky. Once I sold a hand plane to someone who claimed they didn't get it. The dispute ended up in the hands of FedEx to investigate which they did. It looked like the superintendent of the apartment building signed for it and from there things got murky so FedEx and I were off the hook and the buyer and his superintendent were left to duke it out.
As far as bad sellers, I'm sure they are out there but like I say, so far I've been lucky, knock on wood. I think it is important to look at both the rating and the number of ratings.

[Edwin Santos]

Hi Edwin,

There are legitimate buyers and sellers that can be problematic. Misrepresenting stuff, not sending it, missing parts, stuff gets lost, lots of chance for arguments and angry situations that lead to disputes for sure, but that is not what i was referring to; what i was referring to was a totally different issue; The issue of scammers and hackers. Hackers get into legitimate accounts and use without the owners knowledge. they get customers contact info and send phony emails "from" ebay and "sellers" or post photos of equipment they don't have, on the hacked accounts, redirect your emails and funds and disappear. Ebay and the sellers are unaware of whats going on. These are, (a lot of the time) professional organised crime gangs operating from various parts of the world, and they go after big ticket items, Ducati motorcycles, sports cars, machinery etc anything where there is a large amount of money. They don't waste time on $100 items. It's not a dispute situation at all, as when they have your money they disappear, there is no one to argue with. So looking at someones ratings or numbers means you will only be easier to con if the account has been hacked, because you have lowered your guard and have a false sense of security due to the ratings. Like i said this is from my experience many years ago, and hopefully they have tightened things up a lot, and hopefully that kind of stuff doesn't happen any more.

Mark,
Thanks for clarifying, I now see the point you were making. Generally speaking, I think I'm a little more optimistic about society than you are, but in support of your point I must confess that someone tried to hack my eBay account once. Luckily I had turned on two factor authentication which required a code sent to my phone by text message. They hacker did not have it so the most they could do was load up my cart with merchandise but not check out. My recommendation to everyone is to use two factor authentication. When doing so, it is still possible to be hacked, but it is exponentially more difficult for the hacker. Yes it's a pain because you have to have your phone handy, but it's worth the protection.

So yes, what you say is correct, it is very possible for a seller's account to be hacked. If it is an active, high volume seller, I would think the situation would not go on very long because they would know very quickly and report to eBay who would freeze the account or something. But in the meanwhile buyers could get taken.

Anyway my message - use two factor authentication!
And make sure the password you use for eBay is unique so that if your account were hacked and the hacker now has your email and password, they cannot use these credentials to get into other accounts.