Fakes in Ebay

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pnh

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Anyone see the Watchdog program on BBC tonight.Apparently there is a lot of fake and counterfeit designer stuff available on Ebay-who would have guessed:) and much of it being sold by their so called Powersellers.They also showed how easy it is for some of these guys to achieve a good positive feedback rating over time by selling stuff back and forth to their mates.Apparently its all highly organised and they are bringing in container loads of stuff from the Far East and China regularly and passing it off as the real mc coy.
Caveat Emptor I think
 
pnh said:
Caveat Emptor I think
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Good advice at the best of times but it applies in particular to ebay i feel. Feedback is a useful enough tool but i've seen sellers selling fake items with 99% positive and 1000's of feedback. Only a quick trawl through the actual feedback reveals whats being sold is fake, i suppose most others are happy to receive the goods for 5% of the price of the real thing.
 
Another common trick is to buy & sell lots of low value items for a few months, build up a solid reputation and then switch to a high value item, take the money and run.

Create a new username and start again
 
I bought a bag off e-bay. It was advertised as a genuine designer bag and came with dust bag etc. Now, the bag would cost €1,200 in Brown Thomas so I knew that getting it for €200 off ebay would mean that the seller was either completely stupid or the bag was a fake!

The bag when it arrived was a very good copy, but a copy nonetheless. But like I said, I would have been stupid to have thought otherwise, and I was happy with it (by the way it was good quality leather etc and it was worth around the €200 mark anyway).

Anyway, the point is that if an item is being sold for a fraction of what you know it is worth in the shops, you have to know you are not buying the real deal no matter how much the sellers claims otherwise. BUT it does of course mean that all these sellers promising the real thing are basically trying to rip people off because they know its a copy they are selling and unless it is advertised as a copy, these people should not be allowed to sell on ebay. (in my opinion).
 
rabbit said:
There are lots of genuine bargains on ebay too.
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Well of course there are but the point of the program was that these people are selling this designer stuff as the real thing.They used 2 examples and in fact brought purchases to Addidas and Timberland offices in Uk to examine the quality-needless to say neither were impressed.
They also pointed out that Ebay are not doing enough to stop them-and also refused an invite to appear on the program.
 
pnh said:
They also showed how easy it is for some of these guys to achieve a good positive feedback rating over time by selling stuff back and forth to their mates.
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Thats nonsense everybody you sell to can leave feedback, selling a lot of stuff to your mates isn't going to improve your feedback also it can be costly as there is a charge for selling each item.
 
Johnny1 said:
selling a lot of stuff to your mates isn't going to improve your feedback
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Of course it will! The scammer's trick on Ebay is to sell dozens of low value items, eg 1p ebooks, just so they can build up their feedback - and often their 'mates' will be in on it with them. eg A sells B a 1p ebook, A and B leave each other positive feedback, voila. (You need lots of mates though, even if someone buys from you 100 times they can only up your feedback score once).

After a while of doing this their feedback looks respectable (most buyers don't bother checking the details of the seller's transactions, they only look at their overall feedback percentage). And from then they start selling expensive items (eg lots of Wii scams at Christmas) and people assume they're trustworthy buyers because they have 90%+ feedback.

Johnny1 said:
also it can be costly as there is a charge for selling each item.
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Not so. Ebay takes a percentage from the sale price of your item, so if you have sold 100 1p ebooks your Ebay fees will hardly leave you broke.
 
Johnny1 said:
Thats nonsense everybody you sell to can leave feedback, selling a lot of stuff to your mates isn't going to improve your feedback also it can be costly as there is a charge for selling each item.
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There was an article in The Sunday Times a number of weeks ago that uncovered extensive evidence of this type of behaviour.
 
CCOVICH said:
There was an article in The Sunday Times a number of weeks ago that uncovered extensive evidence of this type of behaviour.
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Do you believe everything that you read in the paper? even if they did use their friends to improve their feedback how long will their feedback rating stay close to 100% if they rip people off? not very long.
 
A very interesting forum site to visit before you purchase MP3 players from the internet....www.mympxplayer.org

Quite a few people round the world have bought iPod clones made in China ("Chipods") which are sold as 2GB and upwards, but they have found that there's as little as 512MB real memory. Some are successful in getting refunds, but not all.
 
Johnny1 said:
even if they did use their friends to improve their feedback how long will their feedback rating stay close to 100% if they rip people off? not very long.
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But that's how it works Johnny! They build up their feedback, then pounce! They put a batch of non-existent 'items' up for sale at the same time, people pay for them, then the seller disappears, usually to re-emerge under a new name. Perfect example here.

Jeez Johnny, you're an Ebay-scammer's dream!
 
Johnny1 said:
Do you believe everything that you read in the paper? even if they did use their friends to improve their feedback how long will their feedback rating stay close to 100% if they rip people off? not very long.
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Do you believe everything you read on e-bay?
 
Sorry - meant to post back that it was working again later on. Either the site or my access was experience temporary problems earlier.
 
Most ebay is very good. The paypal system and feedback system protects 99.9% of the time
 
Yes-I agree entirely (except for the 99.9% claim which I assume you made up yourself?). I have used e-bay quite a lot recently and have had to reclaim money via the PayPal dispute process twice in the past month. The problem with this is (in my view) that it is not public knowledge however-other buyers cannot see how many disputes have been lodged against a given seller-you cannot give feedback when a dispute has been settled in your favour AFAIK.
 
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