And that is what I sent to Meg Whitman, eBay CEO:
Dear Meg,
At November 9, 2006 I have bought a 4Gb MP3/MP4 player on eBay auction from the seller blown-z. After I receive this item, I was happy – but not so long, because the files stored on the player become corrupted. Searching the Internet, I found the
www.mympxplayer.org, and the article how to check the real memory size. No wonder that files became corrupted – the player has only 1Gb of memory, and was hacked to show the 4Gb disk space available. Worse, the seller definitely knew that he is selling hacked players, because he had made all his auctions private, and hid his feedback and winning users, so nobody can warn them that they bought a hacked player.
Now here is the problem. I have talked to several people, who also bought a hacked player from eBay, and even from the same seller. Most of them had reported this and other sellers of hacked players to eBay. So far nobody of us saw any reaction from eBay, the hacked players are still there, and those sellers are still selling them every day. People are saying that the real reason is that eBay gets money from those sellers who sell fraudulent items, and when the customer returns the item, the customer is paying for return shipping, but eBay still holds the money from auction fees. Then the seller sells the item again, and eBay gets another auction fee, therefore directly benefiting from illegal seller activity. The customers, including me, are losing money because of what we consider eBay negligence. This hurts the people trust in eBay, and when the people lost the trust in vendor effectiveness, usually they turn to government, and the government creates a new law. Usually those laws are so strict that most businesses wish they fixed all the problems with all those customers instead. But at that time it is always too late.
I left negative feedback, and reported this seller to PayPal, and to his local police in Minnesota, but I cannot report it to eBay yet – see below why. However I am unable to report all the sellers of all the fraudulent items. Neither I can warn all the users about those hacked players they probably bought. In order to do at least something to stop this mass fraud, I ask eBay to consider doing the following:
1. Post a warning in at least in audio/mp3 players category, to inform the buyers about the hacked players, and ask them to check the real memory size of the player they just bought from any seller – not only eBay seller. There are good guides on eBay, like “BEWARE of FAKE 1GB/2GB/4GB/8GB USB Flash Drives on eBay”, which are worth mentioning here. The
www.mympxplayer.org also contains a nice article. Feel free to contact me if you need any information.
2. Send to all the last one-two months winners of 4Gb MP3/MP4 player a message to check the real memory size of the player they bought right now. The reason is that so far nobody have seen the real 4Gb MP3/MP4 player yet, and the chip set that player is built on can only use 2Gb of RAM. Therefore the probability that all those players are fakes is quite high. This would help the customers to recover their money, as most purchases have a short time frame to request a refund.
3. Remove the 10 days delay from “Item received is not as described” eBay report - at this moment I cannot even report to eBay that I have received a fake item, until ten days passed! The reason for this delay is completely unknown for me; obviously the player is not going to gain 3Gb of missing memory in those ten days.
4. Enable the private auctions only for specific categories. There are only few categories where you really need private auctions – for example, selling adult videos and toys. The only reason to use a private auction to sell a cheap MP3 player or a flash drive is to hide the winner, so nobody can warn him to check whether he bought a hacked device.
5. Do something with your customer support. The only thing me and everybody I asked have ever received from your customer support was an automated reply from “unmonitored mailbox”. There seems to be even no e-mail addresses on eBay site to send a question about, and to ensure its delivery to a real person, and therefore I have to send a regular mail! When you report the 10th item, and see no reaction except auto-generated e-mail, it is very disappointing, and makes you think all your efforts are useless.
Obviously none of this will really help the people who have already bought a hacked player. However it would help stopping the flood of selling hacked players, and it worth it. I do not ask you to reimburse my return shipping (which at least partially is your fault; if your fraud investigation team did their job, I would not have to write this letter to you, as you had enough information to stop this fraud before I even bought this player). I only ask you to warn the community, thinking that we, buyers, deserve at least something from eBay in exchange of return shipping we pay returning those hacked players to sellers., while eBay still earns its auction fees.
I am writing this in hope that eBay will be able to solve this issue in timely manner, and we, the buyers community, will not have to involve the media, courts and politics into this. This may affect or even invalidate all your hard work fighting the proposed Auctioneering Regulations, and your opponents will definitely benefit from a situation like this. There are already people who think eBay should be held responsible for its negligence, and the sellers should be licensed to reduce fraud on eBay. And if there is enough people, this might become a law. The rest is predictable.
In my opinion it is better to fix the problem now than wait until it is too late. I would be glad to be informed about the decision you made, and hope you can make it fast.