| - |
|
|||
A reader writes…
|
-
Dear GAN,
I read with interest The Internet Report’s ‘Helpful eBay’, and I thought I would share my experiences. While I know personally a lady who trades very successfully on eBay, I have had a very different taste of online trading with them...
After setting up an account about two years ago, I did nothing for ages, then we had a bit of a life-laundry thing and decided to turn the contents of our attic into readies. It all started very well; I discovered the copy of Dr No that I had read as a teenager was, in fact, a first edition, and it fetched £250. I went on to sell a couple of guitars, I bought (and sold) a laptop that turned out to be surplus to requirements.
I managed 40-odd transactions and got 100% positive feedback, and I even got a little yellow star next to my seller ID. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I got an email from someone accepting the ‘second chance offer’ I had made them for a guitar – a Gibson Les Paul Gold Top for £700. I have never owned one of these, never had one on eBay and certainly wouldn’t sell it for £700! I emailed the prospective buyer and said so.
Then I got another email, similar to the previous one, only this time I had apparently offered someone a Rolex Oyster for £500. Shortly after that, I got a series of very threatening emails from someone who had apparently sent me £800 via Western Union demanding to know where their goods were. I reported all this to eBay, who immediately suspended my account.
Then I got a series of spoof emails purporting to be from eBay asking for my bank/credit-card details to reinstate my suspended account. I reported these spoofs to eBay. They sent me a bill for over £300 (which I refused to pay). They keep sending me bills for this £300, and they have referred the ‘debt’ to a collection agency.
Throughout this saga (which has been going on for 18 months), it has proved impossible to contact eBay. Any emails are dealt with by auto-responder, and on the rare occasions that a human gets in touch, they refer me to a section of the eBay site that I can’t access because they have suspended my account! (They claim you can still get access, but you can’t; you can’t contact them to tell them you can’t because... the account is suspended). Their security is a shambles and their customer service a joke, so I would advise extreme caution in any dealings with them!
GAN is excellent, however!
Best regards,
Ian Morton-Jones
Stuart Maclaren replies:
I sympathise with you, Ian. I have personally found buying and selling to be relatively trouble-free during the twenty months that I have been trading, but I know that others have not had such a nice time of it.
There is no doubt that security is a real problem on eBay, and it seems to be getting worse. In the last few months I have seen more and more sellers adding statements to their listings to the effect that ‘we never give second chance offers’, while others are taking advantage of the fact that you can hold anonymous auctions where the bidder’s identities are protected (from the seller as well as from other buyers, interestingly).
The reason for these precautions is that, as you say in your letter, spoof emails are common and identity theft is not unknown. Indeed, while I have been putting this edition of GAN together I have received another email purporting to come from eBay, which said:
Dear eBay user,
We have ended the following auction(s) on your account as they appear to have been listed by a third party without your authorization:
2486194040 Harley-Davidson : VRSC : VRSCA
2486164312 Harley-Davidson : Touring : Touring FLH
2485662048 Volkswagen : Beetle (Pre-1998)In order to resolve this matter, please click here to verify your account information:
Thank you for your patience in this matter. Regards, Customer Support (Trust and Safety Department) eBay Inc
Which is darned cunning, especially because it seems that you are being warned about potential fraud, little knowing that by logging on and giving the hackers all your eBay information you are being taken in by one! This is just the latest and most cunning of these email messages, but there have been many others.
I think that eBay do their best to stop it happening (they employ something like 800 people to deal with security alone), but whatever they are doing doesn’t seem to be making very much difference. As for their customer service, I agree that it is very poor indeed. Every time I have had a minor query, the only response on offer has been an automated message of some sort, and that really isn’t good enough.
The clever thing about eBay, as they admitted on a recent edition of The Money Programme (if memory serves), is that they make hundreds of millions of pounds without having to store, sell or transport anything – we do all the work. They act as an electronic version of a postcard in the window of a sweetshop – nothing more – and it seems as if that is all they want to be.
I hope that £50 will be some small recompense for your troubles and that it will help you in your fight against the might of eBay. Do write again and let us know how it all pans out. The rest of us will simply have to ignore any emails that ask us for sensitive information and keep a close eye on all our eBay accounts, keeping a special look out for strange messages or unusual activity.
Thank you for your kind words about GAN, though – no spoofs here!
Stuart Maclaren
Editor©Government Auction News
