paxbrit You say;
Quote:Don't give these bad actors any money! When you see their fake goods on
ebay, complain to
ebay, and get them shut out, they'll lose time and money having to re-open every few days.
I don't think you understand the scope of the fraud being run through
ebay. First you need to know that
ebay makes it's money by sales fees. It is business to make money while protecting itself. It will stop a fraud when reported but it has no interest in getting to the bottom of who is doing it.
In 2012 I worked for
ebay Trust and Safety as a World Coin expert. I worked with 6 other professional coin dealers or authenticators mostly retired. We were not paid employees but were volunteers. In late 2012 and early 2013, several members worked jointly on the profile of a profession ring of forgers operating out of China that was selling on
ebay.
This group had opened hundreds of different names on
ebay using information stolen from bank account records. The randomly generated names were opened periods of 1 month to one year before they were actually used for sales fraud.
These accounts always started by selling their own items within their group to build up a false positive feedback. They normally posted and sold cheap knock off jewelry to one another at prices under $1. Payments were all small and ran through fake PayPal accounts which were set up using the same stolen bank account information as the
ebay ID.
So far nothing looked bad except for those of us watching.
Nothing associated with the first group of sales ever had to be actually mailed of course. No real money actually changed hands except for the fees paid to
ebay and PayPal. These were paid.
When these names were finally activated typically in small groups of 3-10 in a group, they began selling coins (mostly dollar sized silver coins) often using the same collection of pictures. The pictures came from a library of images shared within the entire group which still show up on
ebay.
The coins were all numismatic forgeries of course made legally in a Chinese factory. They were non-silver junk items but the type that often fool novice bidders. Prices always started low 99 cents and shipping free. Coins were advertised as genuine of course and the sellers claimed to know nothing about them. At start price the actual costs of the forger were covered. Any raises were profit.
We supplied evidence of apparent shill bidding.
Prices ended up all over the place starting and ending on the same day. A typical weekend for this group raked in several thousand dollars in sales. The coins, if any were actually shipped, came from a single location (traced to a small office building in a US port city which had cargo containers parked in back). We sent pictures we found of it on google earth.
After about two or three weeks, the
ebay ID was abandoned along with the associated PayPal ID. All payments received had by then been sent to one location overseas for other "purchases". The location was confirmed to be the same factory that manufactured "tribute coins".
By the time the scam was normally detected and people started complaining everyone except the final location where the money went was gone.
As a group we attempted to report the entire ring which included over 200 related IDs to
ebay at one time for termination.
The net result was that we were let go and
ebay revised their policy on reporting counterfeit coins to protect themselves legally.
You might ask why? So do I. I still ask 5 years later.
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Posted 10/24/2017 11:52 am
....please read CCF selling rules before trying to sell a coin here
