An interesting article regarding a Fraud scheme Triangulation and Amazon

[pattern-bookstar]

I was reading on .com and they posted this article

http://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Something-fishy-w-invoice-on-item-I-bought/m-p/23538993#U235389...

http://www.doit.wisc.edu/news/triangulation-the-latest-ebay-auction-fraud/

[berubegirl]

This is a pretty well thought out scam that will make a lot of buyers very unhappy and will probably result in ebay losing even more of the very few remaining buyers that still "trust" the ebay platform.

The funniest part about the dot com thread is that those people talk like ebay will actually do something to fix this......rolling on the floor laughing at that idea. As if ebay would really get involved when they are NOT losing any money...forget it.

They will tell us they are working on it similar to the shopping cart issue and then hope that most ebay users simply forget about it. This customer service tactic seems very popular with ebay employees in general for that matter.

[pjcdn2005]

What exactly would ebay do about it?

This same thing happens on many other sites that accept credit cards...it's certainly not unique to ebay. If the credit card companies can't control it, I'm not sure what ebay could do.

[berubegirl]

Humm well what could ebay do.... investigate, end the listings immediately, close the selling account and report the users to appropriate authorities and then re-examine all complaints received from buyers that were scammed. Oh and maybe at least try to coordinate somewhat the Paypal and Ebay fraud department into something that could at least resemble some sort of functioning body.  That would be a start for a company that respect itself and its customers and wishes to offer an honest selling/buying software platform. So the chances of this happening when ebay is involved are slim to none and slim just left town!

[rafael.xavier]

The only one on the hook is merchant who accepted credit card. Ebay has commissions from fraud sale. Bank, PayPal and CC processors have chargeback fees, so ironically all of them have financial incentive to keep this going.

I always find it interesting banks are able to convince merchants they are liable for accepting stolen CC even when "card-not-present" merchants have zero ability to detect fraud and bank has full. Fortunately PayPal protects sellers from "unauthorized use", your CC merchant gateway does not.