One More Sign World Is Shrinking – eBay Is for Suckers

Its sad to see how far Ebay has regressed. I was a seller of lots of random (and sometimes very expensive) things (mostly collectibles) on Ebay for many years. I had 100% feedback, often going out of my way (and taking a small loss) to deal with crazy and&#x2F;or difficult people in order to keep my perfect feedback status.<p>I would pinpoint the time Ebay went off the rails to many years ago, when they changed their feedback system. The whole beauty of Ebay was that it was based on reputation. If I was selling something for thousands of dollars, I would only allow buyers that had plenty of good feedback. This simple system allowed you to avoid 99% of scammers. The only scammers that got through were people who spent a long time acting legit and building up lots of positive feedback, then &quot;going rogue&quot; and using that built-up goodwill to pull off a scam. This risk was small and worth taking (happened to me twice after hundreds of sales).<p>At some point, though, Ebay changed their feedback system so that sellers could not leave buyers negative feedback! You could only leave positive feedback, or refuse to leave feedback at all. Overnight, the entire reputation-based system of buyer&#x2F;seller reputation was destroyed. Within three months of the change I was hit by three scammers, after selling less then ten total items. This was more scammers than I had to deal with in a decade of prior Ebay sales. There was simply no way for me to figure out which buyers were legit, and no way to warn other sellers which buyers were scammers. As evidenced in the article above, Ebay has absolutely no interest in blocking these scammers. Contacting Ebay inevitably results in a canned response that has nothing to do with your issue. Shortly after they changed their feedback system I stopped selling on Ebay all together. It just isn&#x27;t worth dealing with the scammers, and Ebay seems to think that their current business model is fine.

I used to work at eBay Trust and Safety. The place is a nightmare and will not improve. The culture was destroyed by Meg Whitman and never recovered.<p>This kind of fraud sticks out like a sore thumb in click stream. I had no trouble finding fraud and building algorithms to automatically detect it but I did find it impossible finding someone at eBay who cared enough to do anything about it. eBay still gets paid so no one wants to be in charge of a revenue hit. I doubt that&#x27;s changed.<p>Mark Carges tried to turn it around in 2008 and failed.<p>I have high hopes Facebook can move into this space.

For what its worth, thats the &quot;brick scam&quot;. As in &quot;you can&#x27;t sell apple stuff on ebay anymore because of the brick scam&quot;.<p>Usually, they send you a return package with a rock or brick inside approximating the weight of the original package.<p>Its famous enough at this point that its impossible that ebay is unaware. They are fully aware and are <i>choosing</i> to continue to profit off of this. So much so that the &quot;shell game&quot; the author faced is likely scripted by this point.<p>Ebay consumes sellers as a raw material as part of the process. That&#x27;s their business model.

As someone who casually sells their old computers&#x2F;phones on the internet, eBay is completely useless for something like this. It&#x27;s frustrating that they advertise it on TV as a place to sell old equipment, actually trying is futile.<p>Their fee structure is pretty bad (10% of the the sale price?!) compared to just selling it locally on Craigslist if you are in a big metro. The eBay UI to figure all of this out is even less so, and I had to resort to Google to figure basic information.<p>Less than 24 hours after listing an iPhone 6s for sale, it was &#x27;bought&#x27; by someone who was an obvious scammer.<p>They reached out and asked for my direct PayPal email, citing that eBay was broken. Of course, I told them to pay through eBay or I wouldn&#x27;t ship the phone. Immediately after this, I reached out to customer support and reported the account. This did absolutely nothing - the sale was locked up for a week &quot;pending payment&quot; until the buyer &#x27;reported their account stolen&#x27; and the sale was reversed. Nobody responded to my ticket, absolutely nothing happened.<p>I ended up selling it in that time frame locally in less time than it took to deal with all of the eBay BS, and I was able to get something like $50 more.

If you google the buyer&#x27;s address, it&#x27;s home to a package forwarding service. Do not ever do business with a buyer using such a service. 100% guarantee it&#x27;s a scam.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;place&#x2F;78+McCullough+Dr,+New+Castle,+DE+19720&#x2F;@39.6922734,-75.5688828,17z&#x2F;data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x89c702fc680bcabd:0x4bf837ee53036895!8m2!3d39.6922734!4d-75.5666941" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;place&#x2F;78+McCullough+Dr,+New+Cast...</a>

Ugh, sorry you had to go through this. I was in a similar case not too long ago. Basically the same start... the item arrived and a claim was filed stating that the phone wasn&#x27;t working. I offered to help since it was perfectly fine before I shipped it, but I was ignored. I waited until the last date before accepting the return. As Matt mentioned, eBay basically forces you to accept the return or you lose the item.<p>The buyer never shipped it back so it finally timed out after another 30 days and I was able to file a claim and get my money back. Good to know I can unlink from PayPal since they pulled the funds directly from my account. I was in a negative balance.<p>Here&#x27;s the kicker. If you decide to checkout on any site using PayPal, they&#x27;ll actually authorize the full balance behind the scenes. I was definitely surprised when I saw a $400 charge for a $11 item I paid for.<p>eBay sucks for sellers, but you typically still get the best value aside from dealing with criagslist.

I would never buy or sell consumer stuff like an iphone on eBay. On the other hand, I buy used&#x2F;refurb network equipment all the time, from sellers that have like 8000+ positive feedback and 99.8% positive feedback ratings. Very rarely a problem, and no higher rate of problems&#x2F;DOA items than with any other refurb equipment dealers. There are some amazing deals out there for things that are fresh off 3-year corporate leases, or have been decommissioned from telecom&#x2F;ISP sites somewhere for whatever reason. Want a 48-port 802.3af PoE 1000BaseT switch for really cheap, with proper cisco IOS, to put in the wiring closet of your house? It&#x27;s a good place to look. For consumer goods, not so much.<p>also: I confine my purchasing on ebay to and from US domestic vendors with verified accounts, and I never sell to consumer end users...

&gt; eBay is an enormous company with over $8 billion in revenue a year, so naturally it&#x27;s difficult to talk to anyone there who is not a computer<p>It&#x27;s not naturally difficult, it&#x27;s just a decision by eBay. With that kind of money they could pay and train people to provide service to you. Larger companies than eBay operate tech support services, and my guess is that tech support is higher-skilled than the customer service eBay needs.

This has been going on forever. Here is an example from 2007, almost identical to the one in the post.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ask.metafilter.com&#x2F;77638&#x2F;Can-I-trust-PayPals-seller-protection-If-not-what-can-go-wrong#1208841" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ask.metafilter.com&#x2F;77638&#x2F;Can-I-trust-PayPals-seller-...</a>

This is why I&#x27;m starting to consider taking video of me packing and placing goods in the shipping box (while at the shipping company), placing the shipping label on the package, and dropping them off directly with UPS&#x2F;USPS&#x2F;FEDEX (all in a non clipped video). Then also recording the opening of any packages received in returns. Problem is this probably still wouldn&#x27;t be enough evidence and sufficient for eBay.

What I do to protect myself is record a video of me packaging and shipping the item.<p>I record the video at the post office itself, and of course include a shot of the post office.<p>Start the video showing a closeup of the item, then record yourself packaging and sealing the box, and putting on the address label - then <i>very important</i> record an image of the address label, and finally walk it over to the drop box, put it in, and pan wide to record the building.<p>Make SURE never to have the item go off frame or people will say you pulled a trick.<p>The post office where I am is open 24&#x2F;7 and deserted at night, so it&#x27;s easy. When I shipped UPS the guy looked at me funny and warned me he didn&#x27;t want to be in the video, but other than that I was able to record (and I included the tracking receipt I got from them in the video).<p>It&#x27;s a lot easier if you have a second person holding the camera, but it&#x27;s also possible with a tripod, or even just holding it if you prepare all the tape stuck on one side of the flap so you can work one-handed. Do a test shot to make sure your video camera is good enough that you can actually read the address label - and even better the serial number on the product.<p>Keep the video for a long time, several months.<p>I&#x27;ve never actually had to use any of the videos I&#x27;ve made, but I keep making them anyway.

I&#x27;m from the UK. Some years ago we bought a game console on eBay and instead received a photo (!) of one in the post. eBay were unwilling to act, so we went to the local police station and reported it. To our surprise they eventually found the seller and recovered the money.

Contact your state banking regulator and report eBay and PayPal. New York State&#x27;s Department of Financial Services is particularly strong and responsive [1].<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dfs.ny.gov" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dfs.ny.gov</a>

First, sorry that you got screwed on your phone. That sucks.<p>I recently sold 50 4TB hard drives on eBay. I had 2 returns for broken drives that were damaged in shipping (my fault - the first 2 drives I sent weren&#x27;t packed well enough), and one other drive returned that the buyer said was broken.<p>I tested the 3rd drive and found it worked perfectly, so reported the buyer for abuse of the return process (I did allow returns, but only for defective drives). To its credit, eBay refunded to me the shipping charges both ways that I had paid. The buyer was pissed off and still insisted that the drive was defective (and he was a Microsoft Certified something or other, blah, blah), but strangely enough, it had 60 more hours on it when I received it back. Hmm...<p>I guess I was lucky I didn&#x27;t get back a 40GB drive. I recertified the drive, resold it, and had no complaints.<p>My point is, yes, you can get screwed on eBay. But I live in a podunk town of 35K in Indiana and there&#x27;s no way I could have sold 50 4TB hard drives as easily as I did on eBay. Guess I could have tried Craigslist, but I didn&#x27;t want to meet 50 strangers at a McDonald&#x27;s, and I doubt people would even want to buy them without seeing them actually work in a computer system.<p>If this phone thing had happened to me, I probably would have filed a small claims against eBay, regardless of what their stupid user agreement says I can or cannot do. You&#x27;d be surprised how seriously a company takes your complaint if they get a legal document.

This is loosely related to the subject but I wanted to point out a scam that I was victim to and nearly lost more than a grand:. PayPal doesn&#x27;t protect vacation rental by owner scams.<p>The reason that this was a close call rather than complete catastrophe was that I had the listing reviewed by the service&#x27;s internal investigation team while I transacted. The team altered me of fraud, I responded immediately with PayPal to learn that hey guess what - their fraud claims policy excludes vacation rental services! They refused to help me. Further, the scammer knew this policy limitation, and even left me a troll voicemail as I was escalating the scam that was along the lines of &quot;guess what? PayPal won&#x27;t refund you!&quot;<p>Fortunately, I used a credit card for payment. I managed to file a claim with the credit card company and reverse the fraudulent charge.<p>The reason I escalated this listing as a concern was that it had zero reviews and was new. The owner was also a bit too accommodative of my requests. I proceeded with caution.<p>I went to the authorities about this, including the secret service, who for whatever reason handles fraud like this. I never heard back from anyone.

So in Australia we have things called small claims courts, which are designed to make it practical for an individual citizen to sue a billion dollar company for a few hundred dollars. And I think that Australian consumer law would take a very dim view of website terms and conditions that claimed to prevent it. There&#x27;s a tradition of &quot;Yes, your thousand-dollar contract is enforcable, but any attempt to enforce it would be an offence under the Trade Practices Act, and we could fine you a million dollars if you tried.&quot;

It sounds like they still have their money and eBay is &quot;demanding payment&quot;. Is there any reason to give into this demand? Obviously the Ukrainian scammer is not going to sue. It seems unlikely that eBay is going to sue over $465. So, keep the money and don&#x27;t use eBay anymore (which it seems like was the case anyway).

I wouldn&#x27;t recommend ebay to anyone at all. This article probably will help potential scammers to actually cheat more people.

I only sell on ebay rarely, but I buy stuff all the time, big, small, expensive, foreign and domestic, from big sellers (lots of feedback) and new ones. I have never had any problems, some times I am disappointed by the cheap junk I buy from China, but generally I am quite satisfied. I have had to request a refund once or twice because something was not as described, but I don&#x27;t think I have ever had to escalate to ebay or PayPal on anything.<p>All this being said, anecdotes aren&#x27;t data, and I worry every time I read an article like this that I am going to get burned bad one day.

It&#x27;s not just the buyers who are scammers - the amount of counterfeit and significantly-not-as-described stuff being sold is astounding. Ebay is large enough to do their own sample purchases, but clearly they just don&#x27;t care. I stopped using Ebay after they sent me a message saying that I had contested too many transactions (all due to counterfeit goods) and could not contest again for some period of time.<p>I&#x27;m interested in what will happen when Ebay becomes a site for scammers sellers to transact with scammer buyers.

Try to report it to Kharkiv&#x27;s police.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;police.kh.ua&#x2F;?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;police.kh.ua&#x2F;?lang=en</a>

Behind the specific problem of eBay prioritizing buyers over sellers, there&#x27;s a more general problem of how marketplaces can determine who&#x27;s right in a dispute. Other commenters have suggested taking a video while packing up the item and unpacking the return. However, that could be vulnerable to fraud as well; how can you prove that the package you film yourself opening is the package the other party actually sent?<p>Perhaps UPS&#x2F;Fedex could act as a verification service. For a small fee, the UPS store employees could photograph the contents of the package before it gets mailed, check if the electronics turn on, write down the serial numbers, etc. and send a report to eBay.

I had something like this happen.<p>The buyer from hungary filed a item not received claim and they took my money from my paypal account (it has been negative ever since).<p>5 months later out of curiosity I sent a message to the buyer and he replied that he did received. But since the case was closed in Ebay there is no way for me to forward the email I received from him to get my account back up in good standing...<p>I was sent to collections and filed a debt verification letter which they didnt reply correctly and havent responded to it and two years later still does not show on my credit report.<p>If it ever does I will just file the debt verification letter again and ask for small claims court.

Would it be possible to take ebay to a small claims court?

I&#x27;d never do business with eBay, ever. You can surf around there and spot obvious scams in 5 minutes that have been run for a decade.<p>I consider them a co-conspirator.<p>The best bet for selling was Amazon, but now is Facebook groups.

I&#x27;ve had good experiences with hard-to-find items on eBay by following two simple rules: 1) I will only buy an expensive item from a seller with thousands of reviews and a 99.8% rating or higher, and 2) I will only sell an expensive item to a buyer with an account older than three years, more than 100 transactions, a 100% rating, and other expensive and related items in their history.<p>I don&#x27;t typically get the best prices, of course, but I&#x27;ve never been scammed.

Pretty much the same exact thing happened to me about 6 years ago. Nice to know ebay&#x27;s policy still hasn&#x27;t changed. I&#x27;m still banned from paypal because I refused to pay them back the money they refunded to the scammer. I used to use ebay pretty frequently but since that incident I&#x27;ve only been back there a couple of times to buy things (with a friend&#x27;s paypal account) that I really couldn&#x27;t find anywhere else.

eBay is centralized moderation. Maybe a distributed p2p market-based moderation with reputation scores for moderators in addition to sellers, like openbazaar, is the solution: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.openbazaar.org&#x2F;how-moderators-and-dispute-resolution-work-in-openbazaar&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.openbazaar.org&#x2F;how-moderators-and-dispute-resol...</a>

Your problem was checking the box that said you would ship world wide. You can eliminate 99% of fraudulent ebay buyers by only shipping within the US or your local region. also keep and eye out for package forwarding addresses those can be problematic as well but not as bad as a straight foreign shipping address.

I&#x27;m finding it hard to understand what&#x27;s so difficult about eBay &#x27;doing the right thing&#x27; here... surely it can&#x27;t be that hard to take seller evidence into account and cross-reference that with buyer proof that they returned the correct item in the condition they received it...

Had this problem before. If you send something expensive, film yourself putting it in the box, write the serial numbers down, send it recorded or signed for delivery always, withdraw EVERYTHING from your paypal account instantly into your bank account.<p>A friend of mine however ended up with a debt collection agency (Transcom) after him for 6 months because he refused to refund the item. Eventually after much letter writing with &quot;fuck off&quot; in it basically, they gave up because there wasn&#x27;t a genuine claim that would stand up in court.<p>I still buy and sell off ebay but it&#x27;s usually very niche items which are on 1:1 interest and low value (vintage transistors for example). Anything popular, I get the other half to stick it on Facebook and it&#x27;s gone, in cash usually within 72 hours. No fees, nothing.

I will never use eBay again. It took over a month to get a refund for a product that was never shipped. In fact the transaction was somehow canceled by the seller within minutes of it being completed, but it still took a ton of work on my end to get the refund. What a shame

I&#x27;ve not used eBay in years as a seller - ever since they started withholding my funds pending approval&#x2F;release by buyer. Now I just use Craig&#x27;s List and Facebook and sell face-to-face. And as a bonus, I&#x27;ve met some pretty cool people.

This happened to me as well and the thief&#x2F;buyer decided it would be funny to leave negative feedback as well. I&#x27;m not selling on Ebay ever again. The system is s<i></i>t

UPDATE: It looks like eBay refunded him because of the reaction here on HN<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;matthewsag.com&#x2F;?p=1649" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;matthewsag.com&#x2F;?p=1649</a>

Yeah had same kind of issue. Dispute management people told me &quot;If I was running a business, I&#x27;d accept every customer I can.&quot; My response &quot;even if they&#x27;re using you as a free rental service?&quot; Author is 100% right, they totally side with the buyer and they&#x27;re essentially churning through sellers to make money. Even if they ever clean up, fuck em

As I understand his mistake was to sell an item to Eastern Europe. He should have sold it to US so in case if something goes wrong he could use the police.<p>Mail forwarders usually take photos of items sent through them (so their customers could see what they would receive). Ebay could contact the forwarder if they wanted to find out the truth.

I learned a while back to never, ever sell a phone or tablet on eBay. I only use Swappa for this service now, and I&#x27;ve bought and sold several devices on there with zero issues. Anecdotal, I know, but they give equal protection to buyers and sellers, and their employees are actively involved in each sale.

I stopped using eBay in 2003 when I had aweful service with PayPal. It&#x27;s sad. eBay could have been Amazon. It had so much going for it--too good to fail--unfortunately poor leadership wronged the ship.

I just have to say I&#x27;m grateful this hasn&#x27;t happened to me. I just started using ebay again after a ~8 year break to sell off some LPs, and gotten through about $1000 of sales without a problem.

Why does eBay allow buyers to use remailer addresses? It should be very easy for them to check that and not allow any buyers using these remailer addresses.

Wonder what would happen if author filed a small claim in his local jurisdiction? (Against eBay)<p>I tend to think eBay would not even respond and lose by default

I tried to sell Bitcoin on eBay and every single buyer attempted to commit fraud.

Yeah, eBay is not a place to casually sell anymore. The 10% fee was bad enough but now you have to place a bond account even if your account has a long reputation of happy customers.<p>Facebook marketplace is the way to go. You get way more exposure and can usually sell something in minutes.

Okay... So how is this evidence that the world is small?

Yeah absolutely fuck Ebay. It was broken years ago.

I have been a ebay user since 1999. Have accumulated 200 feedbacks and currently at 100% positive. But I have entertained closing my account a few times in past two years and have started to cut back drastically on ebay as both a buyer and especially a seller.<p>First, as others have mentioned, they have a monopolistic marketplace where they require one to use their own Paypal for transactions. The combined fee&#x27;s for selling on ebay + Paypal now are 10% of the final sold amount + the shipping amount. Where margins are slim as it is and things are already selling well below their value at times because of so many other competing auctions, the fee&#x27;s make it not worth it in many cases. They are making a boatload in fees and I&#x27;m tired of it. I just sold $400 golf clubs and had to give them $42? Ebay provides value as the market is so large. I had those clubs on Craigslist for TWO months and not even a inquiry at that price. Ebay got sold in 7 day auction. But to pay 10% for everything is too greedy imo. They have NO competition.<p>Second, ebay has become a haven for scammers and overrun with them to point I am leery of purchasing anything like electronics, phones, etc on there. Software..forget it! DO NOT buy any licensed software from ebay no matter how good buyer feedback. Even if it claims new&#x2F;sealed. The pirates have gotten too good. I&#x27;d venture to say 99% of software on there now is either a)counterfeit from get go or b)legit but &quot;used&quot; and&#x2F;or illegal Volume Licenses. The problem is key will work when you get it but fail 5 months from now or when you need to reinstall. I&#x27;ve been victim of this two times now and NO more will I buy software off ebay. When it does fail, it is long enough you have zero recourse. Ebay you can&#x27;t even file a claim as they give you only like 14 days after purchase. A pirate knows this and gets keys from a keygen. I had 8 legit looking MS Office licenses in sealed retail boxes register then 4 months later started to fail. Called Microsoft and they told me I had registered them too many times and they are now flagged. Huh? I only installed them ONCE. Credit card company didn&#x27;t even help as it was past the time limit for a case. So basically the seller sold many of the same key and whoever bought from him, who knows how many of us, they are all worthless. Really upsets me that ebay allows ANY software even on there. They clearly know that this must be going on. I tried to inform them of the practice but couldn&#x27;t even find a contact to let know. They don&#x27;t care as they are making their fees! Tons of them from software. Their only concern is a small webpage to help identify counterfeit. From now on, I will only buy hard items that can&#x27;t be counterfeited or scammed easily, like golf clubs.<p>Third, as this story is about, ebay is WAY to buyer-centric and I too was once bitten by similar story as topic starter. Not as blatantly bad as the OP or that amount of money, but bad enough I was pissed. Eventually also got someone from ebay on the phone and as similar was brushed off and there was no pleading my case. End of story, refund the money. It cost me out of my own pocket by time it was returned and settled.

&quot;I don’t accept payment by check or Western Union and I don’t accept returns.&quot;<p>If you sell me a broken phone, it gets broken in the mail because you didn&#x27;t package it correctly, or any other thing that can happen between the time you send it out and when I receive it, you should refund my money or accept my return.<p>I buy hundreds of thousands of products per month for my business on Ebay and Amazon and many people outright lie about the products they are trying to sell me. A good return policy is a must.<p>My theory is that it&#x27;s one of the only reasons Amazon and Ebay became the kings of the online marketplace. I&#x27;ve tried to purchase from the other sites and because there are barely any protections in place for buyers, I always go back.

In my personal opinion, EBay and PayPal have both become seriously shady and among my own awful experiences with the two companies I have family members that have experienced varying levels of bullshit treatment, not limited to PayPal hounding them for years for money they clearly did not owe and EBay blacklisting them for this reason.<p>Then there are the horror stories like this all over the internet that just cemented my decision to never use or recommend either service ever again.

Why not just pick &quot;no returns accepted&quot; when selling?