eBay has once again found itself at the centre of a very public fraud trial this week after one of its member sold fictional products and pocketed the very real cash from unsuspecting buyers. The incident, involving an 18-year-old from Wales who amassed around £45,000 over roughly a year, echoes a similar case late last year of a woman convicted of taking £3,000 from five separate eBay customers for non-existent tickets to the Glastonbury music festival.
The judge in the Glastonbury ticket case argued that it's "hardly surprising" that eBay was targeted by criminals given the measures it has put in place to protect users. Now, UK judges may not be renowned for their technical know-how, but given an extremely similar case of fraud has arisen just four months later, this particular adjudicator seems to have a point.
For its part, eBay claims to take fraud extremely seriously and points out that less than 0.01 percent of all listings on its site result in a confirmed case of fraud. This seems very admirable until you consider the sheer scale of eBay's operation. The company claims to have millions of products listed on its site on any one day. If just one million of these auctions finish in any one day, then at the very least there are around 100 confirmed cases of fraud every 24 hours – remember, that's not including the unconfirmed cases.
Eradicating online fraud is virtually impossible. As eBay's director of performance engineering and availability Paul Kilmartin admitted this week, the only way for the company to eradicate fraud completely would be to switch off its site. While this is true enough, to say that eBay is doing everything short of this drastic solution to protect its customers isn't quite accurate.
When Kilmartin was quizzed about eBay's plans for two-factor authentication — using an additional form of identification along with passwords to identify users — he claimed that the company would only implement the technology if customers asked for it. This is a very strange stance to take especially when you consider that late last year, eBay's own chief security officer Howard Schmidt called for greater use of two-factor authentication.
eBay is not alone in dragging its feet over beefing up security — many online banks are failing to keep pace with the technological advancements in this area too. At the end of the day, corporations are happy to live with a certain amount of loss as long as it doesn't impact on their bottom line or their public image too much. This may work out fine for them, but it's not so great for the unlucky 0.01 percent. Implementing two-factor authentication would be costly for eBay to implement, and until customers start voting with their feet it's not going to happen. Given that kind of ultimatum, surely it's time to start voting?
Talkback
i lost £2500 on ebay through a hijacked account, so even though i checked feedback everything !! it was a scam! its too easy to takeover accounts ! even after i complained and asked them to look into it , it took days to reply and the emphasis was on how they werent liable!! ,These days ebay is full of blatant scammers and i dont think they care frankly.
From the poster above its all to easy to see there's always someone worse off. I have been done twice, almost three times over the course of five years.
EBay seems to be lax on these things and even now, their purchase of PayPal a testiment not only to their success but their attitude toward curbing fraud it still isn't enough.
I can't wait for Liberty Alliance or .Net Passport to come out and be adopted, I'm sure that'll fix things
Well lets face it what do you expect from an Windowistic as in M$ Corp Malware organisation but to be ripped off at every chanve they get and not do a thing about it .
After all it would cost them money to fix it not make them money .
EBay not on your nellie .
You want to buy something find a better way cus Ebay aint the way .
Perhaps the author of this article could explain how extra authentication would have helped in these cases; I don't believe it would have made the slightest difference.
No auction system can help if vendors sell non-existent items. The only defence is common sense.
E-bay is basically built on trust and unfortunately therefore is going to attract undesirables. Despite taking reasonable precautions I have lost out on several occasions. The real annoying thing is that E-Bay does not care, they lead you a merry dance, which involves spending more money, on their fraud protection investigation then turn round and say tough luck.
If the E-bay seller doesn't get you then the Post Office will. Goods quite often do not arrive (well lets just say I don't get them) and I have no doubt they were sent. If they do arrive they are quite often broken due to mishandling.
Why do journalists never challenge ebay's 0.01% fraud claim??? Every interview you ever see written, perpetuates ebay's infamous "0.01% fraud" claim. It's been stuck at 0.01% since 1999, yet there are more users on ebay today than 6 years ago. Yet journalists happily swallow that crap and fawn all over ebay execs to get their precious stories.
How does ebay come by this 0.01% figure? Will they show us proof? If not, why not? These are the questions that need to be asked and written about.
Ebay should have a duty of care to protect customers, but they don't want to know....so much so that they don't even have a fraud telephon hotline, instead preferring to have an automated response system that sends you messages totally unrelated to your query.
Some 48 hours ago I emailed contacts at ebay, and used the on line facility to tell them BEFORE THE EVENT that a scammer was in operation bidding on sports tickets to ruin the auctions. This is critical on a time based sports ticket...
What response...none, except telling me to use the automated response system.
NOT INTERESTED AT ALL.
I can't believe that they are allowed ot operate in the UK without having the legal duty that other companies have, i.e. contact details, legal details etc. You can't even get details of their legal advisers to sue them! Who else could get away with this!
well my wife , bought me a serial ata card for my new
hard drive and after two week of waiting to finnaly get everything together . i found out that the copied cd, driver for the ata card was unreadable . the cd worked , but the major problem was , i needed to create a partition for the new hard drive out of the cd. subfolder
the containd disk 1 & textsetup, both of these folders were unreadable. i e-mailed bozz s(23179) and stated what was wrong , not realizing the second e-mail that was sent was all withen a two day facter. this ata card comes with a 1 year warranty. the guy , who's main bussiness is to sell you anything out of his computer fantisy shop , e-mailed me because , i gave him a thums down ratting and he sent me a coment back on my wifes account , call her a trigger happy dimwit. we settled it with e-bay, but i'm still holding a faulty ata card and it's just collecting dust. beware of the bozzy s (23179)
I am currently trying to contact an ebayer member who has sold me 2 Robbie Williams concert tickets for £160. Ebay now tell me that his details are no longer valid! The Police can't/won't do anything until the date of the concert has passed - 6 days to go! And even then they are limited by the information that ebay will disclose to them due the data protection act! I have to sit tight and hope that they turn up in the next 6 days - yeah right! The guy who sold them to me is call Dan Martin and he was in Boroughbridge N.Yorks. I have some leads to trace him... so if you see this Dan, get ready, I will track you down!!!!
I would love to hear from anyone else who has had similar experience!
I have also experienced exactly the same thing - I paid £184.25 for 2 tickets on ebay from a user no longer registered on ebay for the milton keynes concert 15th Sept - I have no tickets and have nothing else to go on - I would be very interested to speak with you further and have listed a yahoo email address for you to email me below
Fraud committed on ebay to me twice.
All involved faulty items first one said he never received the returned item and timed me out to making a rating on him, but watched his site and he put the item up for sale again and did the same to three others over a period of time that I was aware of, it could have being more. Ebay or paypal did not want to know.
Second case purchased computer memory was faulty and returned it, seller faked receiving it until I could show him recorded delivery, then empty promises of restitution, but never done. Again ebay and paypal did not want to know all empty promises and do nothing.
KEEP AWAY FROM EBAY.