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Comment by crote | Hacker News Reader

Seller details of high-volume business sellers, mind you. With additional provisions to protect the privacy of individuals.

I generally agree with the law. Marketplaces like this have long been used as a front for scamming, and with the anonymity provided there are basically zero repercussions. If i am doing business with someone I want to know who I am doing business with, so that there is at least the possibility of taking legal actions. Now let's hope we'll soon see similar regulations for Amazon sellers, ideally with some way to prevent commingling inventory.

The only thing which stands out to me is the relatively low monetary threshold: $5000 might be a lot in revenue if you are selling something like second-hand clothing, but something like a single car or camera can easily put you over that limit already. The bill refers to "high-volume sellers", and defines that as a) 200 orders, or b) $5000. It does make sense to protect high-value sales too, especially considering that the information only needs to be disclosed to the marketplace at that point - providing the information to the buyer only needs to happen at $20.000 and at that point you are definitely a business - but it is interesting that they do not seem to explicitly state so.

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>Marketplaces like this have long been used as a front for scamming

Commercial eBay seller here.

Honestly, it's been damn near impossible to scam someone via eBay (as a seller, at least) since around 2008, when they introduced mandatory PayPal payments by default. Managed Payments (rolled out during the pandemic) makes it even harder to scam as a seller.

There's still the perceptions that hang around from the early days, but buyer protections and reversible payment methods controlled by eBay themselves have successfully scared away the scammers. The only fraud you still get is friendly fraud from buyers.

> Honestly, it's been damn near impossible to scam someone via eBay (as a seller, at least) since around 2008, when they introduced mandatory PayPal payments by default. Managed Payments (rolled out during the pandemic) makes it even harder to scam as a seller.

This seems like a fairly important facet of this discussion.

It’s plenty easy to scam people on eBay if you’re smart.

I collect movies - and eBay has sent me bootleg DVDs and box sets countless times. They’re pretty convincing - even with stickers on the shrink wrap - but they are bootlegs regardless (sometimes poor printing, single instead of dual layer discs, no copy protection, etc.). eBay almost always makes me send them back despite my evidence, so I unfortunately know someone else will get scammed next time, but what else can be done?

Counterfeit Nintendo 64 cartridges are also becoming very widespread. eBay also sent me counterfeit AirPods Pro once. Very convincing box and look and feel, but the atrocious noise cancelling was the giveaway. It even made the little AirPods pop-up on your iPhone.

This is fair - they don't fight counterfeits as well as they possibly could (and frankly never have. 15 years ago it was the same thing with counterfeits).

That's not normally what people are talking about when they mention online scams, though.

> The only fraud you still get is friendly fraud from buyers.

I’ve been bitten by this. I thoroughly tested a PC part, packed it in original anti-static packaging, packed that inside of an excessive amount of packaging and a thick box, and then shipped it all via a well-tracked shipping method.

Buyer waited until a day before the end of the claim period and then insisted the part didn’t work. Wouldn’t cooperate with any debug questions so I grudgingly authorized a return. Buyer never returned anything, never even provided return tracking info. Yet he’s been escalating this to eBay and now filing a chargeback with his credit card company.

After less than 10 minutes with eBay support, they admit that this buyer has a pattern of doing this exact scam. Just follow the steps and provide the requested info and I’ll be fine, they said.

I’m blown away that they know a buyer has a habit of doing this, yet continue to let them operate on the platform. Losing the couple hundred dollars wouldn’t be the end of the world, but I’m deeply frustrated that eBay is so heavily tilted toward the buyer that someone can develop a pattern of fraudulent chargebacks and false complaints with apparently no consequences.

Support's right, you'll win the case. If they open a return case, they need to send the item back. Happens all the time to us.

>I’m deeply frustrated that eBay is so heavily tilted toward the buyer

Their answer to this criticism is that siding with the buyer by default creates trust, which encourages more buyers to use the platform and therefore increases sales volume for their seller. I'm honestly inclined to agree. I'd much rather lose 1% of our revenue each year to fraud and unnecessary returns than 50% through buyer hesitation because they're not sure their items will work or even arrive.

Counterfeits, fraud, and theft: Why Silca changed its return policy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32362363

Good insight into the merchant side of customer return fraud.

>Their answer to this criticism is that siding with the buyer by default creates trust, which encourages more buyers to use the platform and therefore increases sales volume for their seller. I'm honestly inclined to agree.

I'm not: it depends on the seller.

If you're a high-volume seller, then sure: a few bad transactions like this overall is the "price of doing business" because the popularity of the platform means you'll do much more sales volume, which more than makes up for a few shitty buyers.

However, if you're a low-volume seller who's just using Ebay to sell your old stuff, with only a very small number of higher-value items sold per year, then even a single bad transaction like this can ruin your profit and make it not worth it to sell on this platform. Personally, I'm much more inclined to sell high-value stuff via Facebook Marketplace, in-person only, because of this possibility. Add in Ebay's high fees and FBM is really attractive, but the problem is you're limited to people in your local area.

However, Ebay years ago decided they cared much more about the high-volume sellers than the regular Joes using it as a virtual garage sale venue, so this makes sense for Ebay and increasing their stock price. To be fair though, in my years of using Ebay as a low-volume individual, I haven't had many bad transactions, and have been able to sell off a lot of stuff.

> Support's right, you'll win the case. If they open a return case, they need to send the item back. Happens all the time to us.

Haha, this is optimistic.

I'm 99% a buyer (hundreds of items bought, and three items sold, and never again).

I sold a Mavic 2 Pro drone with 5 batteries. The whole process was a mess. Buyer complained that it didn't come with the CrystalSky tablet in one picture (that was only added after the buyer started bidding was requested BY the buyer, to show Flight Logs, was explicitly disclaimed as being a part of the package, and was not in the receipts I sent the buyer). After pointing out those details, silence.

Then, three weeks later:

"The batteries don't work."

"Any of them?"

"Nope. I want a refund."

Note that two of the batteries were less than 4 months old, still in warranty.

He then stated he wanted a refund of $800. Bear in mind, 5 -brand new- batteries would be $670.

No evidence was shown. I stated I'd like to get the original batteries back, as I'd be able to get them replaced under warranty or possibly repaired and recoup some of my money (I was skeptical there was -any- issue, but still, good faith). He agreed. I asked him to send me a message -on eBay- acknowledging that offering a partial refund was contingent on him sending me the batteries back and that he accepts me disputing the refund if not.

He does so.

Refund is sent (for about $700, to include his return shipping costs).

Less than an hour later I get a message, "USPS says they won't ship damaged batteries so I will not be returning them". (Like, 35 minutes. So what, you sat around waiting, and then the moment I sent this money you jumped in your car, got to the post office, had this discussion, got home, and sent me this message?)

I then suggest we meet in person to exchange them (I live a few hours away, not convenient, but still, $700...). He umms and ahhs, "How will I be able to prove that I gave them to you in person?". I suggest we do it in a police station (his local PD even welcomes people to use their lobby for CL, etc.). More umms and ahhs. "I need to contact eBay support to see if they recommend this." (eBay literally has a specific FAQ page describing how they recommend doing in person sales, and refunds, documentation thereof, and how they support it). But he ignores that and says, "I never heard back from eBay support so I'm not sure what to do". I point this page out again, and he goes silent.

I open a dispute. No evidence provided for damage/faulty goods (I'd asked for even a video of him putting a battery in the drone, to show it wasn't active - or putting one on a charger. Nothing.) Multiple instances of the buyer trying to show something/anything was problematic with the listing. Not abiding by agreement, refusing/avoiding any method of returning damaged items.

Overnight, no further inquiries.

"We have closed your dispute. Based on our review, the buyer is entitled to a partial refund for damage. He is also not required to return the damaged items".

So he ended up with a Mavic 2 Pro, with less than 20 hours flight time, 5 batteries, for in the order of $950, all told.

eBay is on the side of least resistance, damage or liability, financial responsibility to eBay, no-one else.

"I’m blown away that they know a buyer has a habit of doing this, yet continue to let them operate on the platform."

I agree it's maddening. The platforms also face the problem of banning someone only to have them open a new shop an hour later as someone new.

>The platforms also face the problem of banning someone only to have them open a new shop an hour later as someone new.

I think Ebay lets you screen buyers based on feedback, i.e. refusing bids from 0-feedback accounts. I could be wrong though. But this is one way to avoid this problem.

It helped for awhile but the obvious methods around it work fine (buy something dirt cheap and get feedback, then scambid later)

Funny thing about the feedback. It helps the buyer more than anything. It became meaningless when you stopped being able to leave negative feedback for the customer. [1]

I remember having a discussion with customer support about this "You mean you will pull money from a sellers account and potentially cause financial harm based on accusations of a person with a 1 feedback when the seller has thousands of positive?" the answer "we cannot rely on feedback alone sir"

I slowly moved away from selling on ebay commercially at that point. Every few years I list a couple items (still have some inventory, or something to sell) only to have someone scam or attempt to scam within weeks. There seems at times the only "gain" the scammer gets is to cause a "loss" to the seller...not sure the end game though.

[1] https://pages.ebay.com/services/forum/sellerprotection.html

They can ban you more thoroughly, based on the delivery address, for instance. A determined scammer can just buy a new PO box, of course.

Selling a laptop on eBay, there were two bidders and one cancelled at the last minute after pushing the other way up. Other bidder then refused to pay, claiming they hadn't got their paycheck. I waited the mandatory time and then got on eBay support, they recommended using a setting that essentially banned anyone from bidding on my items who has a pattern of cancelling. Why this isn't the default is beyond me, or why eBay doesn't ban such buyers. The fact is these kinds of actions are abuse of the system: they can remove competitor's listings prematurely or make them unattractive to bid on, without any loss, and keep doing it.

I can see you being frustrated by your time being wasted in a failed auction, but why should you feel the other guy should pay a bid-up price?

I've buy a bunch of stuff on ebay auctions, but when I'm losing an auction and suddenly I'm winning because somebody cancelled, I just nope out of it, qui bono, could be the seller.

How did auctions handle this before Ebay? I imagine they had various rules for how to handle buyers flaking out.

The "bid-up" price reflects an automatic bid that you set in advance: you allowed the system to bid on your behalf, up to a specified amount. The other seller outbid your maximum bid, and then disappeared, but that bid was still your maximum bid. Of course, it seems unfair because if that bad buyer had never bid in the first place, the final price might have been much lower.

Honestly, I don't know what should be normal and proper here, which is why I asked the first question. Ebay's auction rules mostly follow pre-existing norms for auctions, but not entirely.

You just don't set a bidding price early, it can only increase the final price you pay. And don't bid unless you're willing to pay.

Well at least one party bid up unnecessarily, that's the point.

> I’m blown away that they know a buyer has a habit of doing this, yet continue to let them operate on the platform.

Makes me wonder if it's more convenient to have known scammers with known records (unbanned accounts) and just refund sellers since it's a known issue, than to have unknown scammers with less certainty (new accounts) with uncertainty on whether the seller is trying to pull fraud.

(A former commercial eBay seller here.) First, you can block a buyer from interacting with your store ever again. Second, you can leave a scathing review of the transaction and the buyer; if it's factually correct, eBay won't remove it, no matter how the buyer insists.

This eventually lowers the scammer's rating low enough to be a signal to other sellers. Such an account is either left to dust for a year or so, until the bad reviews go out of the rating-calculation window, or is replaced with a new account.

This works if you're a seller with some daily volume and selling experience. If you just want to sell a piece of your stuff at a random moment, you're at a higher risk, and are for a bigger downside if scammed.

But anyway, eBay's policies are stacked against the seller and heavily in favor of the buyer. I understand why it makes business sense.

Yeah I don't understand how it's even possible to get scammed. eBay always sides with the buyer and refunds them if the seller doesn't do it first. In the extremely unlikely chance that a buyer somehow loses an eBay dispute, they can still file a chargeback with their credit card.

> Honestly, it's been damn near impossible to scam someone via eBay (as a seller, at least) since around 2008

This is not true. Several sellers sent me broken version of a device I was looking for recently. In fact, it turned out that, for the device I was seeking recently, pretty much everyone who was selling around slightly (say, ~25%) below what I thought was the market price (for a used item!) was selling broken versions of it. The ones that were slightly more expensive actually worked.

Go to your purchase history here (substitute .com.au for your local site): https://www.ebay.com.au/mye/myebay/purchase

You should see a button that says "Return this item" for your faulty product. Click it, go through the prompts and complain that it wasn't as described. In the description field, write "broken". If the seller hasn't set up a proper RMA process, the system will automatically generate a return label. Once you lodge the return using that label, you win the case (regardless of hwo well the fault was described by the seller). The seller will also be billed for the label.

I'm aware, I already did that. And yes, I got my money back. That seems completely beside your "it's near-impossible to scam people since 2008" point though? Unless your position is "it's only a scam if it succeeds"?

There's a legitimate market for faulty electronics, which I personally participate as both a buyer and a seller.

People buying something without realising it's faulty is an expensive problem for me, as it inevitably means a return which is both time consuming and leaves me on the hook for postage both ways (return postage usually being a more expensive method).

If they're trying to scam with it, I doubt they'd get very far as it's extremely expensive and ruins your metrics.

It's great that you deal with faulty devices honestly. I sell my own share of broken devices too. The difference between us and these sellers is we're honest and upfront about faults, instead of trying to pass off broken devices as "tested and working". The fact that they instantly issue a refund without even a single peep suggests to me they know fully well what they're doing and that it's profitable for them. Regardless of whether they do this intentionally or just out of reckless disregard, whatever metrics are supposed to be getting ruined by this evidently aren't getting ruined enough; my experience shows the problem is clearly there.

To be honest wih you, I've been in the other seller's exact situation before. Just the other day, we sold a PS2 which had been serviced, tested and confirmed working.

The buyer received it, the disc tray would even eject at all. They opened a return request, sent it back and it turns out that the employee who serviced it hasn't properly reinstalled a small clip that holds part of the disc drive in place, which led to it collapsing internally during shipping.

Other times, we've had requests which were not our fault but simply not worth fighting. Why spend time, energy and money trying to convince someone to be a bit more patient waiting for their $5 item when you can just refund and ban them from future purchases?

Multiple times, I've been accused of all kinds of nasty things even when there's no fault or issue at all (and in 0% of cases, this has helped the buyer).

I think the average punter just seriously underestimates the difficulty of thoroughly testing second-hand goods.

Well your experience is not relevant to mine. My device didn't need a "thorough" test, literally turning the device on and testing its most fundamental functionality would've told them it's broken. No, mine did not have mechanical or sensitive parts like this that could've broken along the way, or anything like that. These were very clearly something they never tested. And no, they weren't $5, they were quite a bit more. And these were very clearly priced just enough below the actual working ones to entice you into buying them.

Of course it doesn't seem like you want to to believe me no matter what, which is fine. I'm not sure what the point of arguing to discredit my experience is. It just drains our energy to no end. I know what I see, and you know what you see, and that's basically all it is.

The current scam on eBay is to provide a tracking number to the same Zip Code as the purchaser.

These tracking numbers are attached to the sale after the tracking number shows delivery.

By default eBay will close undelivered item cases because the tracking number shows the item was delivered.

Appealing the closed case is possible, but the link to appeal is difficult to find and the level of proof required is high.

I know because it happened to me and it took going to my local post office, talking to the postmaster, and getting the USPS internal tracking log. And that required convincing the postmaster I would not try to recover the package from the home where it was delivered.

I assured the postmaster that this was a scam, and it helped my post office serves an affluent zip code,

It was a ridiculous amount of time and effort for the amount involved.

This is not to dig on eBay. I still prefer it to Amazon. But that’s the scam you can use if you are so inclined.

Not that I am suggesting you are.

> The only fraud you still get is friendly fraud from buyers.

Nope, I've had 3 different sellers run the exact same scam on me.

Each time it was an item not even close to as described -- e.g. damaged and used when advertised as new, an old inferior model different from the one advertised, etc. No problem, I can understand people make mistakes so I ask for a return and they send a prepaid label, I ship it back.

But turns out they've manually entered a totally different tracking number in eBay's system for the return label tracking info. I ship the item back but obviously it never shows to eBay as delivered or even sent in the first place, and there's no way in the user UX to correct the tracking info to the label you sent.

The only way to resolve it is to call eBay, except that's almost impossible because it has to be a callback initiated through a link on their website, and if you've called too many times before, they stop showing the link. (Turns out there's still a way to do it, clicking through several links in the support center, as long as you're not logged in so they don't know you're the one "using up" their phone support.)

Because the actual return label is in their message to me, a customer service rep eventually decides I'm right, they can manually see that label was delivered, and so they'll initiate a full refund but it will take several days. But every time, the refund doesn't go through. You have to wait a couple of weeks, call them again, explain the whole process again, and then the refund will go through on the second attempt. (All 3 cases, it required the second try.)

Three times, three different sellers trying to offload junk on me instead of the actual new item, and using this "wrong return label tracking number" scam so not only does it not get refunded but they get the original (albeit crappy) merchandise back too! Definitely a full hour of work to deal with eBay after each one to get the return fixed and actually refunded, and I imagine most people can't even get someone on the phone to do it. (Chat and messages simply didn't work or get responded to, or they were unhelpful autoresponses.)

I've lost out on buyer's protection through similar eBay shenanigans. I opened a dispute and the seller didn't respond. But that doesn't mean you win as a buyer. There's an additional step you have to take in order to claim your victory. Some arbitrary clock ran out by the time I noticed it was too late.

Believe it or not this is still better than the Amazon experience.

Yeah, buying anything 3rd-party through Amazon is basically like gambling, and I don't recommend it. Ebay is MUCH better and safer than Amazon 3rd-party: you can look at seller feedback easily and see if a seller is a trustworthy, long-time seller or not. Amazon is only good if you're buying from Amazon itself.

My "new" (and I don't claim this is unique at all) rule for Amazon is that I no longer buy 1) anything that goes in or on my body, 2) is a safety device (carabiners, rope, flashlights, etc.), 3) is a fire hazard (charging bricks, etc.), or 4) high counterfeit risk/low barrier (SD cards, etc., as I do wedding photography professionally).

And that's even from the "Manufacturer Store", "from Amazon". Still not worth the risk of co-mingling (which I'm skeptical even happens, even if Amazon says a seller can opt out of co-mingling).

Last three things I bought from eBay had issues. Just didn't work. I am waiting for the last return refund but the other two did work ok.

There are easy ways to scam on eBay as a seller - you just have to know what is and is not covered by eBay's Money Back Guarantee for buyers and make sure what you are doing purposely deprives buyers of that protection.

Two examples that I've seen play out repeatedly in recent history:

List a pre-sale item that is 60-90 days out, with no intention of actually shipping anything. By the time the buyer realizes they've been had, it will be past the time they can file an eMBG claim and eBay will tell them "too bad."

Or list hot items like a Steam Deck or MoonSwatch under "Specialty services" or "Business and Industrial Equipment" instead of the correct category (again with no intention of actually shipping anything)...if some poor sucker doesn't notice and buys it any way, once again eBay will tell them "too bad" because those special categories are exempt from the money back guarantee.

Sure in both of those cases, buyers can resort back to a chargeback with their payment method, but eBay absolutely allows the scam to happen and typically does nothing on their side to prevent it proactively or assist the buyer after the fact.

And then of course there's the perennial favorite - send an envelope with a piece of paper to an address in the same zip code as the buyer so you have tracking with a delivery scan and any "item not received" claim will instantly be closed in the seller's favor.

> Or list hot items like a Steam Deck or MoonSwatch under "Specialty services" or "Business and Industrial Equipment" instead of the correct category (again with no intention of actually shipping anything)...if some poor sucker doesn't notice and buys it any way, once again eBay will tell them "too bad" because those special categories are exempt from the money back guarantee.

Back in the day, I knew people who'd make a fortune buying "Plam Pilot"s from eBay (because you couldn't edit your item title, and fuzzy search was not/barely a thing. They'd search out common typos, and buy and resell stuff that was just not getting any/many bids (this is before Buy It Now was a thing, too, though you might have guessed that from the Palm Pilot reference...)

It's super easy: provide a valid FedEx tracking number to the proximate area code that is eventually marked as delivered, address and content don't matter. That's it.

I ordered a drone, tracking showed 3 pallettes of 50lbs each, PayPal did nothing. If you're not the shipper, FedEx won't disclose the destination address despite having the tracking number and PayPal won't lift a finger no matter how often you tell them that's not your actually your zip code or that drones don't weigh 150lbs. Afaik it's FedEx specifically.

That's when I was done with PayPal. I was not happy when ebay introduced their own payment system with forced KYC but PayPal is worse.

I bought a raspberry pi off eBay earlier this year for about $120. It was fried and didnt actually work and was able to return it for a full refund.

Seller was super nice - but I imagine the reason they were nice is because they didnt want me to make an extra report about them. They prob had to pay for the $10 I spent to ship it back (unless it comes out of eBay?) but either way they can try that 10 more times and try to turn a profit on an otherwise valueless item.

I've wondered before if there isn't a nice business for scammers on ebay where they buy high value broken parts for nothing then sell them and graciously accept returns from anyone who notices. Eventually the part lands on someone's shelf as a spare or for a delayed project and the issue isn't discovered until long after the return window.

I doubt this would pan out for a rpi-- too low a price relative to the cost of accepting a couple returns. But there are many items it probably would work for...

You could try it, but all you'd achieve is paying half a dozen lots of return postage before getting your account limited for having bad metrics.

Can't you just also sell some random cheap crap (perhaps via drop-shipping) to pad the activity on your account and avoid having a bad rate of returns?

I mean, you could, but you'd still just continually be paying for returns on faulty items over and over again.

I dont know how much the user paid to get my pi returned - but it couldnt have been much. They are pretty light and fit in a small envelope. It wasnt rush delivery or anything.

I imagine if the rate of return was 80%, and eBay didnt ban you, youd make money (minus your time)

I disagree, I've been the victim of dropship scams before and despite it being strictly against both eBay and Amazon's TOS there's not even an avenue for reporting as a buyer. I've also definitely received used/returned items which were marketed as "new". I think the nature of scamming is changing, but there are definitely scammers

I'm assuming you're talking about situations where someone lists an item they don't have on eBay, then have it "drop shipped" from another seller on Amazon once it sells (or vice versa)?

If so, you might be interested to know the INFORM act requires sellers who meet the $20K threshold to disclose if a different seller is shipping the item and if so, if the buyer request, they have to provide the contact info for that seller.

"Whether the high-volume third party seller used a different seller to supply the consumer product to the consumer upon purchase, and, upon the request of an authenticated purchaser, the information described in clause (i) relating to any such seller that supplied the consumer product to the purchaser, if such seller is different than the high-volume third party seller listed on the product listing prior to purchase."

I know a lot of buyers have been frustrated with this kind of online arbitrage drop shipping for years and most of the marketplaces don't enforce their policies about it - it will be interesting to see if this helps curb the practice.

Contrary wise, I ordered 8 of an item on eBay, and received only 2. The fact that the full FedEx shipping weight wasn’t enough for even 4, and that the box wasn’t physically big enough to fit the items (pictures provided in my complaint), didn’t dissuade eBay from declaring that the seller had “confirmed” that they had shipped the correct number, tough luck for me.

I experienced a similar thing from purchasing something from a fraud (realized what happened after I submitted payment) website that used PayPal for payment. PayPal refused to follow or investigate what I was saying and found. I had to get my credit card company to issue a charge back. They listened to me. I told them how to call FedEx with the tracking number and that FedEx cannot divulge the actual delivery address but they are allowed to verify if the package was delivered to a given (one's home) address. The scammers send a package with tracking number to an address in the same zip code and have people grab/pickup the package, or they have access to FedEx's system and can look up package tracking numbers. The size and weight of the packages won't make any sense for the dimensions of the item(s) purchased too. PayPal also refuses to close the PayPal account associated with the scam website!

You need to open a not as described return, not a non-receipt case.

Some older methods of seller fraud don't work anymore, but there are plenty of new ones that do.

I had a seller try to steal $20k from me-- and they told me right out that eBay wouldn't refund it. They were right.

In my case the seller sent an item which was ultimately delivered back to them (they seem to have intentionally munged the delivery details so that a delivery to me was never even attempted). The tracking however ultimately showed "delivered" and that's all eBay cared about.

I even got a phone recording of the seller admitting they had it back then demanding more money from me to send it again! Ebay didn't care. (Maybe the seller actually would have come through if I'd paid their ransom but I surely wasn't going to send more money to someone who was trying to screw me over)

Through extraordinary effort I even got the full detailed shipment history, including showing it going back to the seller's address (which AFAICT the shipper wasn't really supposed to give me but I basically spent a whole day at their offices). Ebay didn't care, they demanded a letter from FedEx corp on Fedex letter head saying the package wasn't delivered to me (even though you could just see that from the cities named in the online tracking-- it never even made it into my state). I couldn't find any way to extract such a thing from Fedex even with another trip back to their offices.

So ebay ruled against me, absurd.

Fortunately I was still within the window to reverse the charge on my credit card (though ebay wasted enough time that I almost wasn't)-- and the credit card took care of it.

Back to the topic: This law would have done nothing for me. I was already able to track down the sellers identity without difficulty-- but what am I to do with that? I could sue them at great cost with years of trouble and time and a substantial risk that I get nothing-- including my legal costs-- because they're bankrupt or vanish. Honestly I would have much rather spent my time and money suing eBay since at least there would be a possibility of recovery if I won.

My entire problem was ebay's pants on head stupid policy that regarded a package as delivered to me even when the tracking made it completely clear that it wasn't. I don't think the seller even had to lie to ebay: they simply had to respond "Here is the delivered tracking number: xyz".

> My entire problem was ebay's pants on head stupid policy that regarded a package as delivered to me even when the tracking made it completely clear that it wasn't. I don't think the seller even had to lie to ebay: they simply had to respond "Here is the delivered tracking number: xyz".

Yup. With apologies to the BOFH comics of old... "Click. Delivered. Close dispute. Clickety-click. On to the next one."

> Back to the topic: This law would have done nothing for me. I was already able to track down the sellers identity without difficulty-- but what am I to do with that? I could sue them at great cost with years of trouble and time and a substantial risk that I get nothing-- including my legal costs-- because they're bankrupt or vanish. Honestly I would have much rather spent my time and money suing eBay since at least there would be a possibility of recovery if I won.

A month after "losing" a phone a guy calls me from a couple of states away. "Hey, I bought a phone on eBay and it's apparently yours. If you got a new one through insurance, could you unlock it for me? I mean, I know it sucks, but you got a new phone and this way I am not getting scammed too".

Set of balls on him. I said I wasn't willing to do that, because how do I know he wasn't responsible for my phone being "lost"?

So we figured something out. He reached out to the seller, asked for a refund. Seller said "pound sand". I didn't know at the time, but the seller lived -very- close to me. He says to seller. "I am in contact with the legitimate owner of the phone. Refund me or he gets all your contact details."

Seller refunds.

Buyer gives me all his info anyway.

I check out his eBay page, and it's the most blatant case of selling stolen electronics ever.

Not just "broken/parts only". But 50+ MacBooks, most "missing charger/accessories", same with phones "no accessories included, as-is". I look at the listing for mine and the IMEI is on the page, to give the illusion of legitimacy. But the last two digits are transposed, so it's not valid. To a cursory buyer, "must be legit, or he wouldn't put the IMEI on the page", to me, who lost my phone, in the event I searched the IMEI, no results. All of the IMEIs were like this, last two digits transposed.

Call the police. "Hey, this guy is selling hundreds of thousands of stolen goods".

They could not care less.

"Well, he probably didn't steal them himself"

Uhh? Fairly sure that's still a crime, especially when it's obvious from your listings that you're covering that up.

"Not much we can do. Sorry."

Whatever. I resisted the urge to drive to his house and pour sugar and water in his gas, but only just.

> it’s been damn near impossible to scam someone via eBay…

I got scammed by an eBay seller with thousands of transactions, and an almost faultless history. He shipped me a ‘brand new’ Punkt phone, but when it arrived it was in really bad shape: not only was it scuffed and scratched, there was about a year’s worth of call-history on it.

I made the mistake of contacting him first - and he immediately opened a complaint against me with eBay - meaning I was unable to leave a review of the sale (therefore his impeccable record).

In the end, because I had pictures and evidence of the phone having been used, next to screenshots of the sales page describing the phone as totally brand new, I eventually got my money back.

But nowadays I only buy from stores on eBay.

This seems like an example of a scam not working on eBay.

> This seems like an example of a scam not working on eBay

It did work, because even though I got my money back and returned the phone, the mechanics of the complaints process - and his immediate opening of an issue against me - meant that I was never able to warn others of his dishonesty.

This is a seller that had “100% perfect” transactions.

>This is a seller that had “100% perfect” transactions.

Won't save them, eBay will close their account after a couple of disputes like yours.

Fraud is much easier on Amazon since Amazon has product pages for multiple sellers. On eBay every seller lists their own products as a separate listing.

This means on Amazon you can be fooled into thinking that you are buying from Amazon, but in reality the product you are getting is from a random seller. What this tells you is that Amazon doesn't care about getting rid of scammers. They are part of the business model.

> The only thing which stands out to me is the relatively low monetary threshold

Which is typical for laws like this. Make the essence of the law something most people would agree with ("disclose high-volume sellers"), then define some ridiculous numbers so what the law actually means is disclose the details of anyone who does any semi-serious business there and doesn't just sell the odd used sweater.

How does this stop someone from setting up a virtual address, phone number, EIN, etc to hide behind?

Or the classic: a corporation or LLC.

You have to provide government issued ID if you are a high volume seller that is a business and not an individual. There are also different rules about address disclosure for corporations. Per the blog post

This from the article

> However, sellers that are not individuals (businesses) must provide a valid personal government ID on behalf of the seller (business) or provide a valid government-issued record or tax document that includes the business name and physical address.

This is easy to do.

https://ipostal1.com/virtual-business-address-plans-pricing....

I use 1Postal as my “virtual mailbox” now that my wife and I fly across the US six months out of the year and our “home” the other six months is a unit in a “Condotel” in Florida that we own that doesn’t accept mail.

It specifically shows up as a physical address for post office coding and lookup purposes and not a PO Box.

Setting up an LLC is also easy to do and relatively cheap using sites like nolo.com.

Most regulations just screw up average people while being completely toothless against the actual criminals.

Yes, it’s easy for a criminal to do that. However, then they escalate from simple marketplace fraud (which is very hard to prosecute) to committing wire-fraud which is not just a federal felony but also carries stringent punishment and is much easier to prosecute.

For evidence, see the trial of Elizabeth Holmes and SBF.

That’s not criminal at all.

During different parts of my life, I’ve done real estate on the side, group fitness as an independent contractor and software development as an independent contractor (C2C) each time I went to nolo.com and registered an LLC that was recognized both by the state and federal government.

As I said in another post, I’ve set up a virtual mailbox for other reasons where all of my mail goes to. But they also sell business use cases. None of this is illegal. I had an EIN and reported taxes through it.

The GP's point is that if you do these things in conjunction with a scam, you're now ticking off more crime boxes that could increase the severity of a punishment. There are a lot of perfectly legal things that when done to commit a crime lead to someone breaking additional laws.

(See also: never mess with the postal service police.)

I don't know if this comment is a genuine question or one of those questions noting that any system could be defeated. I think it's genuine, but it still makes it hard to respond to. Anything I can say, you can rebut because it's not a 100% deterrent. We don't have rules because they work 100% of the time, but we also don't want to live in The Purge where there are no rules. Often the rules we've put in place make it more difficult to break the law and deter the vast majority from doing so.

It doesn't stop someone from doing that and there will always be ways around things, but it's not that easy. Virtual addresses should require a notarized Form 1583. Maybe some don't do what is legally required, but things have become harder. Yes, you can get virtual phone numbers and burner phones, but there's a reason why a lot of sites want SMS verification: most people won't go through the cost and effort of getting a burner (and sites can differentiate between VoIP/Google Voice and real phones). Yes, you can get an LLC and EIN, but that again costs money and spreads knowledge about your identity a bit more. Yes, maybe you can fake some stuff, but then how are you getting the money? Are you getting a check for "DefinitelyNotAScam, LLC", but you're not a member of that LLC so you can't cash the check? Yes, maybe some places will still cash the check, but we're now talking about lots of payments that are eating into your margins: LLC fees, registered agent fees, burner phone numbers, virtual addresses, shady check-cashing places taking a cut, etc. And if you need to get a new LLC/phone/address for each scam, you're really increasing the cost and effort. It also increases the surface area for mistakes. If you're looking to insulate yourself, the more places you need to register and do stuff, the more chances for mistakes, especially as people are starting out. More surface area makes it harder to hide - certainly not impossible, but harder.

Know Your Customer rules in banking haven't eliminated money laundering and other nefarious activities, but I'd guess that they've made them a lot harder.

Yea, it doesn't stop everything, but it does really change the money and effort required. Maybe you don't think it's that much money or effort, but it might be enough to deter a lot of stuff. How does the lock on my house deter theft? I've seen the LockPickingLawyer make short work of basically every lock. Why even bother with a lock when the lock can be so easily picked? Yes, I know that the locks on my home won't stop determined, skilled thieves. However, they do work well enough for their intended purpose. Will these measures work well enough for their intended purpose? I don't know, but it does seem reasonable to think that they could raise the cost and effort enough that it'll deter a lot of bad actors and leave platforms with more resources to handle what's remaining.

It's just hard to respond because you can easily say, "well, I know a place that will give out virtual addresses without a Form 1583 and I know how I could..." Yep, there are ways around things. I think this is more a debate about how much bad activity it will deter. That's kinda the situation with almost everything in life. How much will masks prevent COVID spread? How much will a lock keep my stuff from being stolen? How much will a semi-anonymous username-based system like HN prevent really bad stuff that some anonymous forms see? How much does email or SMS verification deter bad acting on platforms?

It's just hard to figure out what you're looking for in a response. Yes, it won't stop someone truly determined to get around it, but maybe it should give you the same amount of comfort that the lock on your house does - and most people don't leave their place unlocked.

You’re saying a lot. But nothing I am suggesting is either illegal or counter to the law.

I set up an LLC through nolo.com that takes care of all of the paperwork that makes it a legal entity registered in my state.

I file the necessary paperwork with IRS and get a legal EIN.

I legally register my business to have an address that is legally allowed to offer a virtual mailbox and gets mail from the USPS.

I give eBay the legally required information for my business.

This all completely above board and shields me personally from lawsuits. I set up business bank accounts and credit cards and don’t commingle funds.

So do you think the bill is worthless because there are legal workarounds and therefore we should give up trying to regulate online marketplaces? Or are you suggesting that the bill doesn't go far enough and that your suggestions should also be illegal?

He's addressing the first one, but I could read your comments as either way in which case there's two different discussions going on.

There is nothing the bill is doing that lets the customer know who they are buying from. If I want to hide my identity, I can obscure it using legal means.

This is just as useless as the GDPR that just added cookie pop ups across the web.

Currently eBay requires verification of a govt issued ID and SS#, not just EIN.

Everything I am reading is saying that eBay will allow an EIN.

I have four eBay seller accounts. They require SS# and ID as part of managed payments, in addition to the EIN. There system didn't want to take the information on one of my accounts, even though it was valid, and they suspended payouts for a month. Got it sorted out eventually.

I’ve bought two cars on EBay that were more than $20K each, neither from a business. I felt like I could already get as much info as I wanted to go through with the sales (both of which went smoothly), so I’m not sure a single transaction of $25K (or even perhaps any amount) means I need this additional policy.

Single transactions the buyer is more likely to bother to go chase if they go sideways anyway.

> If i am doing business with someone I want to know who I am doing business with, so that there is at least the possibility of taking legal actions.

If you don't want to buy from Joe Anonymous, that's your choice. But if I want to, why should the government prohibit it?

For the same reason a lot of marketplace regulation exists in effective societies where markets are key to economic functioning.

A good marketplace develops consumer trust. Parasites will try to exploit that, creating bad experiences and diminishing that trust. But that is bad not just for the consumers getting scammed, but both the marketplace and society at large. It's also bad for society to have lots of money ending up in the hand of criminals, because they will then go do more crime.

And note this doesn't stop you from doing business with Joe Anonymous. You just can't do it on an online marketplace. But you can always just not look at the details if you want, so you can get the experience you seek with a little custom CSS.

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