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-Signs, Portents, and the Weather-
"I bought this jeep on eBay and got scammed please help"
2007-10-19
Note: This post is severely OFF-TOPIC and possibly only slightly comprehensible to the RB tech head community.

This is a link to a thread at the eBay "Trust & Safety" discussion board, where I lurk from time to time.

The relevant background here is that eBay's founders had a great concept for this global peer-to-peer marketplace, but an overly optimistic view of human nature. Their mission statement begins with: "We believe that people are basically good" and this single line has hamstrung eBay's security obligations essentially from its first auction. eBay has grown to be its own little ecosystem, with vast numbers of people flowing through and around the system at any given second. And like in any large complex ecosystems, malicious and opportunistic elements are drawn like flies to carrion. At eBay, the swarms are scammers, thieves, skriddies, haxorz, and Eastern European mafiosi.

The "Trust & Safety" (T&S) discussion board is a user-to-user group where folks who feel they've been scammed or ripped off can go to request help or information for their specific situation. Over the years, I've seen that many internet scams and security vulnerabilities are reported first at the T&S board. eBay rarely fixes the problems that are examined there, at least not until they become a problem that costs them money out of their own treasury.

At any rate, the link here goes to a very interesting discussion of some new twists on old eBay scams. Don't click on the links embedded in that thread; you can follow the commentary on the eBay page just fine.
Posted by:Seafarious

#13  LOL!
Posted by: Seafarious   2007-10-19 19:06  

#12  He's lucky it was a car. He could have been scammed and ended up with Belgium.
Posted by: DoDo   2007-10-19 17:20  

#11  #10 Zen - too true. Thanks to someone mentioning that Fred get paid (probably very little) when people go to Amazon through his link, I clicked on his link today to buy books instead of using the link in my Favorites as I normally would.

Too bad he doesn't get a percentage of what I paid....
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut   2007-10-19 15:35  

#10  (I've offered and would send a check if I had a place to send it.)

Glenmore, please go to the main page and scroll down to the yellow box on the right-hand side. The second link is to Fred's email. A polite request for a snail mail address will usually result in a nice missive from Herr Fearless Leader. Fred needs all of our help as much as possible right now. Please give often and early.
Posted by: Zenster   2007-10-19 14:29  

#9  Now about that nice bridge I have for sale in Brooklyn....
Posted by: 3dc   2007-10-19 12:52  

#8  The car wasnt delivered but the bill appeared on my Pay Pal account and had to be cleared by me and the Aussie seller as frauulent
Posted by: Glamble Bonapart 1352   2007-10-19 11:16  

#7  A point I forgot to make is that eBay is sort of its own little hacker/cracker factory; lurk at Trust and Safety long enough and you can see these things evolve almost in real time. It might not be a bad idea for the Fibbies or the spooks to detail someone to check in there from time to time.
Posted by: Seafarious   2007-10-19 10:50  

#6  If somebody bought a car, then where was it delivered ? If to you, then the car seller may be the scammer.
Posted by: wxjames   2007-10-19 10:19  

#5  someone scammed my ebay account and bought a car in Australia, I talked with the Aussie and said he understood, thank god it was an Aussie!Pay Pal and E-Bay pretty much suck and should be held responsible for these kinds of scams until they can correct the problem
Posted by: Gleamble Bonaparte1352   2007-10-19 09:32  

#4  Stuff like the eBay scams and spoofs can and do happen on other internet commerce sites as well. I used to be able to easily recognize the spoofs just by the syntax or style, but no more. In many cases I can't even tell from the embedded link names. So I don't do e-commerce any more. I feel guilty freeloading here on the 'burg, but I don't do PayPal (I've offered and would send a check if I had a place to send it.)
Posted by: Glenmore   2007-10-19 07:25  

#3  Maybe it is a spoof page designed to hurl our snarks into the endless void of cyberspace, never to be heard from again.

pooplisting 101
Posted by: Frank G   2007-10-19 06:18  

#2  How do we know this is the real Rantburg we are posting on? Maybe it is a spoof page designed to hurl our snarks into the endless void of cyberspace, never to be heard from again.

Posted by: Gluting Fillmore1934   2007-10-19 05:05  

#1  Very innardstesting, Sea. Reading through half the article has persuaded me to randomize my passwords and stop using my computer's administrative user account.

This article also confirms my belief that these sort of scammers should be faced with international extradition, massive hard-time jail sentences and confiscation of assets when apprehended. These scumbags are not just predatory but also the one's most prone to really screw up a person's computer.

Sites that install malware and spyware must be forced by law to have a click-through that unmistakably announces the site's intention of installing such software on your computer. Anyone who violates such a law should be subjected to massive financial penalties and hard jail time.

This sort of crap is really reducing the quality of people's computing experience and retarding the development of an honorable Internet economy. The benefits to our world of a functioning Internet economy are so huge that all countries need to band together on this with mutual extradition pacts and similar agreements.

Countries whose governments benefit from such nefarious activities need to be cut off from the Internet and be subjected to destructive haxing. We cannot afford to have something so important as the Internet being disrupted by a small community of unethical criminal users.
Posted by: Zenster   2007-10-19 04:47  

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