Hong Kong eBay Sellers Defraud 5 Million Dollars - Buyers Beware!
Posted by Harrace, Senior Internet Marketing Coach
Auction fraud, in particular in eBay, being the biggest auction site, is happening worldwide. Today, Hong Kong eBay fraud made the headline in the news with a group of faked ebay sellers cheating more than 5 million Hong Kong dollars!
The Hong Kong police has arrested 8 people, who were alleged to sell new and limited edition electronic items in eBay, and after receiving payment, never shipped out the goods.
During the last 6 months, they put up items like MP3, memory cards, and DVD players for auction in ebay, and the products were sold at normal price or slightly below the normal price, from a few hundred dollars up to $5,000 per item.
So who would bear the loss? Most probably the buyer!
Wait, but does eBay and Paypal have some buyer protection policy? Yes, they do, but the protection is very limited.
1. eBay doesn’t guarantee the items sold on eBay, as eBay is not the seller. Buyer is soley responsible for checking out the sellers and the product description, including return and refund policy. Even though you may get some sort of protection from eBay, if the product is not as described or never shipped, the claim process would take a long time. Do you have the experience of making similar claims to eBay before?
2. Paypal’s protection is limited to unauthorised transactions, i.e. if the buyer’s card was charged without the buyer’s authority, but it doesn’t protect for cases of non-delivery.
So is there any way to avoid or reduce the risks of fraud?
You are welcome to post any suggestions here. I will make a separate post on “How To Avoid eBay Fraud”. Stay tuned!
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July 28th, 2007 at 2:48 am
Well, it is just a case in daily life. The same thing can be happened if those thieves open a store in a main street selling genuine products to the community to gain their trust . Once they have their community trust, they start to replace genuine products with fake ones before buyers notice they can escape and you can\’t find them anymore.
One way to protect buyers may be looking for a web site who chooses to have a SSL cert that signed by an authority which gives warranty to buyers. (e.g http://www.instantssl.com by comodo) hence if buyers are cheated, there are some sort of insurance.
But how does it work? I don\’t know. I never been cheated on line so far.
Proson
July 28th, 2007 at 5:44 pm
Though I am not the student of your course, it is very good and efficient for Mr. Harrace Lau to post this fresh news. (I studied newspaper these 2 days but there is not much information on how to avoid the e-bay fraud.)
July 28th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
Thanks for dropping by, Proson and Stephen! I just posted some tips on how to avoid eBay fraud. Hope this helps!
Regards,
Harrace
July 29th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
Dear Harrace,
Thanks for your tips!
So kind of you!