Counterfeits Are Taking Over Ebay, Slowly..

There very well may be an investigation going on right
now that we won't know about for 3-6 years.

When I was a young CPA, prior to practicing law,
I audited some banks. When they, the banks, would get
counterfeit money the secret service wouldn't even
be interested unless it was a lot of money.

For an investigation into ebay and counterfeit money
the SS would do a very long investigation to make it
as big a bust as possible. Many grand juries would be
involved over many years.

Some day you very well see all of this in the news.

bobby131313, if you're an attorney you should know it's the secret service that handles
this, not local authorites. My last post point was that the secret service would do a many year
investigation into something like this, and it could be going on right now, for a few more years.
They would want to make this into a public notice and a lot of publicity.

I'm adding this. Anyone involved is this in any way may
very well be under electronic surveillance right now.

Two things ebay could do right now!

1). Eliminate the 1 day and 3 day auction formats. This would give ebay more time to find and cancel auctions of counterfeit coins.

2). Close accounts of repeat offenders that list and sell this stuff. 15 & 30 day suspensions don't work.

#1 thing ebay could do to prevent this a bit:

Ban listings from China.

This is a nostrum, at best. A substantial amount of forgeries now are being listed using stolen/hacked accounts, and the shipping-from information can very easily be falsified.
On top of that, the advent of the drop-shipper obfuscated the origins of many items. Once drop-shipping was legalized, the people behind the forgeries/fakes/counterfeits would use "front" sellers located in the US to resell the merchandise, allowing the front seller to advertise a shipping address in the USA, even though the item in question was straight from China. This is one of the things that absolutely wrecked ebay after the late 90s -- the previous river of small-seller sales was washed over by a tsunami of dropship sellers listing hundreds or thousands of cheap Chinese items in every conceivable category, drowning out most of the small seller base that the company was founded on by ensuring they could compete neither on price nor volume and certainly not on visibility.

Other things that ebay could do to prevent this:
- Require a certain amount of positive feedback to list in high-fraud areas such as Coins, Paper Money, and other places with known VERO issues, say, 50 at a minimum, with no negs.
- Provide a "Report Forgery/Counterfeit Item" right on the seller's listings for all listed items.
- If more than 3 or 4 unique bidders report an item as fake, automatically delist the item and suspend bidding pending further review, and refund the seller's fees, if any, to prevent issues there.
- Require all sellers listing in high-fraud areas to honor a 14-day, no questions asked return and refund policy, and strictly enforce it.
- Require a feedback score >50 or >100 to use the 24 or 72 hour auction format.


ebay will do none of these, since it makes its profits off seller fees, and these actions would reduce profit.

We've been having this debate in the ebay community for years. VERO (Verified Rights Owners) was the catalyst -- as you may recall the great Handbag lawsuit. ebay was ordered by law to respect rights owners and delist any items found to be in violation of copyright/trademark. This did NOT sit well with the post-Meg ebay team, who were making a mint off seller fees from knockoff handbags/purses/shoes/clothes/etc. Basically, a VERO could ask ebay to remove any listing that the VERO considered a fake, without any further discussion needed. Versace, Coach, Prada, Gucci, and many other brands wielded this to great effect.

Don't think this is a new issue with coins, either, as far back as the early 2000s pre-Lithium forums we had a special, invite-only forum called CFE (Coin Forgery ebay), where we would post listings, analyze fakes, out sellers, etc. Someone restarted it in 2013. We & many others put a lot of pressure on ebay about the unsearched roll fiasco, use of grades in titles, etc. along with other groups such as C&PM (Coins & Paper Money community) and they eventually gave in, and added a modicum of protection, but not nearly enough.

Type in "Great United States of America" 169 listings and not one of them is real. I wish there was a way to report a mass list. Reporting these one at a time is killing my mouse and my finger.

I'd like to add something that I think may be important to
anyone interested in doing something about US coin counterfeiting.

CoinHuntingDrew does an excellent job of finding
counterfeited US coins. I'm not a coin collector, I'm on
this site because of my interest in gold and double eagles.
But I do have real experience in government investigations.

If CoinHuntingDrew and others like him would send photos
and explanations of the counterfeiting, showing the
source, to the Secret Service, every so often, it really
could get something done.

It has to be by regular snail mail.

It is just a matter of getting someone in the right position
making the decision to do something about it.

Also Representatives, Senators, many at least, will
forward complaints to the Secret Service.

I just want to say something about this right now. There are laws that are in place, but do you really think the government really cares enough to go out and arrest/fine every single person who has possession of counterfeit money? No, most certainly not.

I don't consider them "harsh" laws, considering they never really are enforced unless someone is caught distributing a large amount of counterfeit currency into the market because they have a fake "printing press" in their basement and are making millions off of it.

That law doesn't really go into act into the people who have possession of these counterfeit coins, yet alone dollars. Even the distribution aspect is tough to monitor. ebay is one thing, but there's flea markets out here where there's korean/chinese people selling counterfeit "silver" coins for $20+ and fake goods, etc. It's almost like they are part of some team of slaves, sent to the U.S. by their commander to purposely sell counterfeits, take the funds back to their home land and be happy. Obviously, this is most likely what ISN'T happening, but when I go to flea markets I see these people.

There was a huge raid last July at a flea market out here that gets hundreds of thousands of people yearly. On a randomly selected friday, out of nowhere, federal agents basically just raided the flea market and was on the hunt for counterfeiters. My friend was at the flea market that day, since he goes every friday and experienced pretty much went on. Bunch of federal officials running around seizing goods, etc. I don't know if anyone actually was arrested.

http://www.post-gazette.com/local/w...201408050192

So this is not to mention that law enforcement is trying to do something to stop counterfeiters from distributing goods in the U.S, but ebay and other internet websites contribute to a large reason why this garbage is here.






I'd love to do that, but I think you'd need quite a large amount of people who are all trying to get the same goal accomplished. It'd take a bit to get recognized.

We were talking about ebay, which is different.

I've represented Chinese companies, people of Chinese heritage,
charged with counterfeiting goods in the
US. No big deal. Get knocked down to misdemeanor, pay fine.

But United States counterfeit money on ebay, I'm saying is something that could be of interest
to the Secret Service in an organized crime investigation. It could be, and may be.
It's called a RICO investigation.