Interesting ebay happenings from China....

pruebas

I regularly search ebay for certain keywords and always get these listings for Chinese Olympic medals in my search results. Today I decided to actually look at some of the listings and found some interesting things:

1) One real seller, many ebay accounts. All from China.
2) Account has 0 seller feedback, usually 20-30 buyer feedback (to make it look "seasoned").
3) All buyer feedback is from 1-3 days of buying ~$1.00 items that are delivered electronically (e-books, etc.). So the person basically buys their feedback rating for ~$30.00. Feedback is usually in a variety of languages to give it an international flavor. Much of the feedback is from NARU sellers or removed items (probably themselves fraudulent).
4) Many photos are watermarked from the same seller (i.e. helloxianggang).
5) All of the items open cheap (from $0.99 to $9.99).
6) All of the items have very high shipping charges (>$100.00 and sometimes >$200.00) Some have extra charges for fuel, customs, packing, insurance.
7) The items are listed on both ebay US and ebay Australia.
8) Seller gives his/her e-mail address in the listing and is always xxx@126.com (free Chinese webmail site).
9) When ebay ID gets too "soiled", it gets NARUed or they dispose of it (look at "pass1zhao" for example).
10) Seller takes paypal only. Paypal e-mail address is different from listing e-mail address and is published in the listing.
11) I've seen similar activities on ebay Spain.

Here is a sampling of the sellers accounts: bestprice5188, baby85999, yanzifly2008, lovequanguo520.

Other than scamming ebay for FVF, I am not sure what is wrong with these listings. They certainly must not be providing real value or why have so many ebay accounts?

Anyone else notice this stuff?

coinpictures

Everyone seems to notice it.... except for eBay.

pruebas

My feeling is ebay tolerates it because, as Meg Whitman said, ebay will not lose China (like it lost Japan to Yahoo).

IloiloKano

Even if you point this out to ebay, they will still very likely take no action against the seller whatsoever. I know from experience when I could prove based upon ebay images alone that a Chinese seller was listing counterfeits. I told ebay this on numerous occasions, and they let every single auction complete. Ebay only took action when I bid on the auctions to prevent more people from being taken, and I didn't pay him, and the action they took was to suspend ME. And even when I pointed out that "seller" had posted vulgar feedback on me, they refused to remove it, even though I cut and pasted from their own policy which stated that vulgar feedback was one of only a handful of reasons feedback would be removed. Since the seller was listing counterfeit US coins, that qualified as counterfeiting US Currency, so I contacted the responsible US Agency (The US Secret Service) to notify them that ebay was aiding and abetting counterfeiting of US currency by allowing these auctions to complete when I could prove to them (and offered to do so) that the item in question was indeed counterfeit, as they were all cast copies of a single original, and they had exactly the same diagnostic marks, even though the coins were each banged up separately in order to try concealing identical diagnostics. Eventually, ebay removed the vulgar feedback, suspended the Chinese seller's account and reinstated mine, but without explanation. I found it interesting that ebay was taking a significant cut in final value fees and PayPal fees on all these auctions that completed, the highest one went for $10,000.

By the way, should ebay attempt to contact me and threaten me with a libel suit, be aware that I saved every single bit of communication from that time, and I will continue to save it until I die, or until someone ask me to help in a class action lawsuit, in which case I will hand it all over without any charge whatsoever, and I won't ask for a dime. I would also love to hand it over to any criminal investigative agency that wanted to look into the matter.

IstilllikeZARcoins

IK - I guess that you don't own any Ebay stock.

Seriously though - interesting post. It got my attention anyway.

pruebas

More to my point about the new seller buying his initial positive feedback, I came across this one today:

ebay user wangye88482008 got this interesting buyers feedback in his profile "Customer did not want item, pd us to give him good feedback, possible scammer!". Link

To give him credit, however, some of his items now have realistic starting prices with free shipping from China.