Back - Because eBay lacks Programming Talent
alefzero
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This highjacker would be extremely easy to stop as they always include the image to steer victims off of the site. Not a difficult red flag to set off alarms.
https://www.ebay.com/str/onestopbuy2014
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Comments
I reported a few dozen of their listings before you posted this. I agree, it’d be easy for eBay to implement a simple way to automatically flag this scammer.
Nothing is as expensive as free money.
Every time we find one of these listings we should ask for specific photos "the coin with a single light at K 10 so I can see the reflections off the eagle's beak"
ANA 50 year/Life Member (now "Emeritus")
“WE DO NOT RESPOND THROUGH EBAY MESSAGES!!!”
Nothing is as expensive as free money.
It is not just coins. He/They regularly post half a dozen pieces of high-end (by their estimation) American silver hollow ware, always under a hijacked account. I contact the real owner and ebay each time and they poof in a day.
The idiot posts all of the stolen photos. Many of you probably know the seller, MBarr. He always basically puts a business card image in his lots. Well, this individual or team steals his a lot and includes that image. Also there are original sellers' internal inventory numbers that are simply duplicated in the lot titles. First time I saw him doing this, he actually was "selling" a certified coin that I owned at the same time. Usually, if not always, they are listed on the weekend, when anyone halfway competent at eBay has off, due to seniority. So he probably gets a few victims every time. It is lucrative enough to keep on doing it.
Use their posted email address.
I really don't know that ebay wants to build code to search for a specific person, do they?
It seems that if Ebay looks for different variations of the text below, no matter what the email address is, they can flag the issue. (They may also look for the "no bidding" phrase or a variation)
Link takes me to a page that says "we are sold out".
Perhaps the store is now gone?
bob
Searching for scammers on ebay is like playing Whack-a-Mole without a club. They reappear, often within hours, under a different name - same scams. Cheers, RickO
Ebay reads all messages so if you contact a spam seller chances are ebay may delete them that way if you make a pointed comment.
This seller is not a spam seller. It is a scam. They do not use eBay messaging but instruct their victims to contact through their external email, which eBay cannot read.
It is a piece of cake to simply catch and flag that single graphic they use every weekend in these assault in the eBay image uploader.
Problem is that, since the mid-1990s, the growth of the internet has opened up an enormous number of programming (now called developing) opportunities. The field is flooded with individuals with little talent and requisite logic to perform efficiently, unlike before. There are always the right ones out there. But ignorant managers are not good at differentiating them.
Large organizations can sometimes be very siloed organizations and the developers may not even be aware of the issue.
Large organizations are heavily automated and some issues aren’t identified until reports are run and reviewed by a human.
Management may not view it as a priority or may not want to modify code for every individual scammer.
There are lots of reasons why this “simple catch and flag” isn’t being implemented. I don’t believe it’s fair to blame a new generation of developers without an understanding of the specific internal operations.
should eBay remove those seller's accounts? Those accounts usually have high feedback.
But there could be hundreds of similar things going on. Just because this is the one you're aware of doesn't mean it is of singular importance on the ebay end. They will end up searching for 500 specific people who can then simply evade the search by tweaking their message. I would assume they want/ need a way to catch generic problems not specific individuals.
Usually, they're hijacked and for the days, weeks, or month they last, it's rip-off central. Then on to the next account.
ANA 50 year/Life Member (now "Emeritus")
Same thing with high-end audio equipment BtW.
Of course not. But it is simple for a company like eBay to implement an OCR tool (which pulls text from images and is very common now) to flag images that contain email addresses or certain keywords. This problem would essentially go away overnight.
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