Interesting Statistics From Ebay

There seem to be a lot of people who believe that ebay monitors posts to enforce their own rules.

If that were true, ebay could perform a simple search using their own terms to determine that a significant number of all postings in the world coins category are prohibited by their rules and the seller is clearly admitting that to anyone familiar with the vocabulary used by ebay.

Today in the world coin section there are 589,000 items. I did not confirm that number by count and I know it is slightly high since other items like books show up in the category. A SWAG (based on a random sample), indicates that about a half million coins are running.

A search of 4 prohibited terms (replica, copy, counterfeit and forgery) disclosed nearly 2,000 violations.

So 2,000 out of 500,000 coins or nearly 1/2 percent could be terminated automatically if ebay simply chose to do so.

Next I expanded the list to 12 terms including those normally used by counterfeit collectors. The number located expanded to over 3,200 items or about 0.7% of all posts.

These 3,200 auctions are the honest sellers who are giving fair warning to bidders that what they are selling is not genuine. These are soft targets for termination. I never included these in my totals for removal. It was like shooting sitting ducks - not sporting.

Then I used the 15 terms that more devious individuals use to "evade" potential screens and yet still disclose what they are doing. That raised the total to about 7,500 fraudulent auctions which raises the percentage to 1.5% of all posts. The "give away phrases" and words are familiar to me and some other committee members and were developed specifically to identify patterns associated with the big forgery rings.

The final statistic is an extrapolation based on my daily search of auctions involving 8 reales. In those auctions which average 2,800 coins on any given day, I discover on average 360 coins that are fraudulent in some fashion both with and without any warning. That rate is 13%. If I take that rate and apply it to all 589,000 coins in the world coin section - I would estimate that as many as 76,000 items could be fraudulent EVERY DAY.

Extrapolate that to include all of the coin categories and the average number of auctions is 1,800,000 items of which perhaps 250,000 are fraudulent at any one time (terminating over roughly a 10 day average interval).

The number is mind boggling but it captures the potential scope of the problem. The number is impossible to police effectively with a committee of 8 persons. If all 8 worked 8 hours a day 7 days a week - they would have to average over 3,000 coins per day per member. That is 766 per hour, 13 a minute or one coin about every 5 seconds. Even if the reviewing staff was 10 times bigger you would get only 55 seconds per coin.

*** Moved by Staff to a more appropriate forum. ***