Seller Fraud: Major eBay Masquerade Ends!
Photo by: oceanaris
East Lancashire Police ended a nine-month hunt last month by taking in a Nelson resident as a trophy. The law enforcement agency arrested Jonathan Hartley last month and has charged him with involvement in a large fraud that allegedly netted him £90,000.
Jonathan Hartley is accused of conning more than 1600 individuals by collecting payment for goods he never delivered. He is said to have done all of this using his innumerable false identities registered with eBay. Memory add-ons was his favorite product. He is said to have beguiled many eBay users into paying to buy it from him.
Presently he stands accused of money laundering and trading in fake goods. He is expected to face further charges before his case comes up for hearing on 12 May.
eBay has unveiled its Identity Confirmation program that promises to reduce such seller fraud at the online auction site.
This is a new initiative from eBay also revealed last month. It prevents fraudsters from using stolen identities of regular users of eBay. Beginning June, eBay is slated to start collecting information about users, especially their trading habits.
It would make a note of such particulars as the computer that visitors use while trading on eBay. The system is alerted to a fraud when it finds a user trading from a machine other than the one he has used in the past to carry out successful transactions. In such a case, the company will give a call to the user and ascertain whether the transaction was genuine.
Sellers at eBay would be required to submit their landline numbers and, optionally their mobile numbers as well, as a part of this program.
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November 19th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
I Purchased a car using eBay and it turned out that this 2007 Car should not be on the road and has a 3 page list of faults so I started to look at the seller of this car and soon discovered he was in fact a car dealer and had been kicked off eBay several times after a couple of the members complained about him.
Since I have consumer rights I contacted eBay to ask for contact details and what I got back was half an address and a telephone number registered to an hospital. I asked eBay for more information so I could take civil actions but they did not reply. Other people contacted me and told me that this particular trader has had several accounts closed down already and they to would like to contact him.
It seems to me that eBay are only concerned with getting paid and you can bet payment for the advert of the car I brought got paid no trouble.
Since eBay won’t protect buyers I decided to write a program that list all the cars the seller has sold in the past along with technical details for each car and in some case it provides an average selling price. See http://ebaymotors.freeblogit.com/
Later I will be publishing a list of sellers on the internet who are not registers as a business and are selling several cars a month with links to cars they have sold in the past in an effort to get eBay to protect buyers and ensure they don’t hide behind the data protection act when asked to provide details and to pass on more information so that fraudsters can be tracked down.
eBay are quite able to stop this practice and all they need to do is write a bit of SQL like
Select Count(*) from Sales Where Count>5 and ItemCategory =Car AND AccountType=’Private’
March 17th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Nice Info, I will visit again. Thanks For sharing the information