IMAGE THEFT & Stolen Money -- eBay's ridiculous policies

[vesivus]

Hi all.

I have a "customer" who bought $160+ of items from me, filed a dispute he didn't receive them, and relisted ONE of the items on eBay using the picture that I TOOK and used in my auction. I have the original picture.

I filed an eBay policy image theft against him and showed my auction and his auction id. They said that the auction Id I provided was NEWER than his auction (It was a relisted eBay store item). I sighed, emailed them back, and explained that I'd been listing & relisting this same item for YEARS. I dug through my deleted emails in box and found an older purchase of this item. I provided it to them.

Just heard back -- there's no proof who's picture it is. They recommended I put a watermark on all of my images.

MY GOD! I've been listing this for YEARS and have the ORIGINAL photoshop .PSD files. I told them this, and they still cannot do anything?

eBay's "trust & safety" is the exact opposite in my experience. I'm sure that PayPal is going to award the 'dispute' to the "buyer" even though I have a shipping manifest generated by Canada Post shipping software AND a signature & stamp by a Canada Post employee proving I shipped.

I am so fuggin' angry at eBay for just allowing these ripping-off consumers to keep taking our money -- and now MY PICTURES.

Frig.

John

[dipmicro]

"customer" who bought $160+ of items from me

There is a record about this on eBay showing that the person purchased this from you BEFORE listing their own. Pull the original listing #.

Other than that ... it may be hard to prove the picture is yours even if you have original PSD files. Check the picture meta-data (if supported) it usually shows the information like camera type, date taken and who knows what else. But these are easily strippable by photo editing programs, although you might get lucky and the person simply copied your pic.

[whoscloset]

Did you report to .com or .ca? You will SOMETIMES get a better response from .ca.

[vesivus]

Hmmm... I think probably reported to .com (I use eBay.com most of the time as I have SMP)

[ameroindustries]

They will do nothing . Pointless getting up in the air about it you have to have a copyright on it .

[tea_past_times]

I feel for you.

[vesivus]

Hey Central Metal -- a picture automatically HAS a copyright on it. You do not have to register it in north america.

[vesivus]

Well, I sent a follow-up email stating I've been using this picture for YEARS, and that I have the original.

I got the stock "We've taken care if it, but can't tell you what we're doing due to privacy"

I guess I *think* something is being done, but I will never see any physical proof. *shrug*

All I can hope is that people at PayPal use there brains and realize that this person bought stuff from me, resold some of it, and claimed 'no receipt' to get it for 'free' from me. 😞

Go PayPal. *Crosses fingers half-heartedly*

John

[dipmicro]

"We've taken care if it, but can't tell you what we're doing due to privacy"

This is quite interesting alibistic phrase that allows eBay/PayPal to send it and do ... nothing. IMHO there is no privacy issues since you are the party to the dispute.

I am imagining the courts of the future ... because of pricacy reasons, each party has their own courtroom. Judge comes to one courtroom and listens to the story, then he goes to another one and listens to another story. Then he rules but does not tell you how otherwise you would learn if you won or lost and subsequently if the other party won or lost. You have been mediated.

[vesivus]

Ha ha. Yeah.

I just checked my feedback... it jumped down from 99.8% to 96.1% because of a few bad feedbacks from 1/2 a year ago.

Wow... what a drop. I hovered over the 'how is this calculated', and I cannot understand how they got those numbers. I didn't have 5 negative and 25 neutral, unless they are calculating a per-item (and not per customer). That is unfair when a single bad buyer purchases 10 items and leaves a negative or neutral for each. Sheesh.

John

[jewelry_quest]

I create all my own HTML templates. Another seller emailed me to let me know that someone else was using MY TEMPLATE that I created and the copyrights were at the bottom of my template. The other seller stole my template was using it to sell their items on. I emailed Ebay and Ebay said that they would allow the seller to use my template for 2 weeks until they could get all their listings changed over to a template of their own. Well that is MY template, MY creation and that seller violated Ebay policies and Ebay didn't suspend them and allowed the seller weeks to use my copyrighted templated. As far as I'm concerned in this case Ebay didn't follow their own policies in the regard to copyright theft! That seller should have been suspended and should not have been allowed to use my template a minute longer. All those listings with my template should have been taken off Ebay but because the seller had over 3,000 items with my template it is my speculation that Ebay would loose out on some heafty income if they suspended the seller or ended the listings. So to put it in a nutshell Ebay will violate their own policies to make a buck! Now how fair is that?

[vesivus]

Not fair at all.

The "buyer" used my OWN image to resell my item, and PayPal sided with the "Buyer" and refunded my $160 back to him after he RELISTED the items he bought and sold them back on eBay.

Complete and total fraud, and I was the one who had to pay.

John

[dipmicro]

Online fraud with profit is a theft and theft is criminal offence. You can always file a report with police, probably worth a phone call and see if they will bother for $160. Usually they bother even for $40 when it comes to speeding violations.

[vesivus]

Hello Dip. Yes, I know it's theft.

The inconvenience to me, sadly, is not worth the $160. I make much more for my time doing other things. I lost my product, which wasn't $160 worth - my cost was around $100. For each hour of work I need to do to recover this (and the possible hassle involved), I'd seriously be inconveniencing MYSELF for little $$ as compared to other pursuits I'm involved in.

The principle behind the fraud is my issue. eBay doesn't even TRY to use their brains to solve these issues. The people whom I talked to already (wasting about 1 hour of my time) were in complete agreement with me, but those people are not tied into the 'back end' decision making process.

It's just a bad system.

John