How Much Fraud Is There On eBay?

from the plenty dept

Business 2.0 has the story of one eBay scammer who bought and sold on eBay legitimately for many years until launching his grand scam that defrauded people out of nearly $300,000 in fake auctions. They use this case to highlight the fact that eBay's fraud prevention mechanism (mainly their feedback ratings) don't prevent many types of fraud. The article also suggests that eBay isn't being completely forthright about how much fraud goes on on the site. They only report the numbers of cases where eBay has been convinced that a scam actually took place - but not everyone reports thing to eBay (they might not tell anyone, or they may report it to local authorities or the FBI instead). Basically, they say you should be careful before you buy any large ticket items on eBay, which is probably not the PR message eBay would like to be out there.

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