[oldnemesis]

Because a lot of people now PMing me, here is a little how-to.

1. Contact the seller. There are some (rare) sellers, who are honest, and will work with you. A good indication is a number of negative feedbacks - if the number if high, the seller definitely knows he sells fraudulent stuff, and your chance is slim. If such a seller does reply (rare), ask him to pay for the return shipping too. Do not agree just for refund while you still are responsible for return shipping - you have better chance to get the refund from Paypal/CC company.

2. Leave negative feedback for the seller. Be constructive; feedback like "I hate u ch3at1ng a$$hole!!!" is childish, and does not provide others with any useful information. The "CHEATER: sells 4Gb hacked players, which are 1Gb real, no refund, no reply". "CHEATER" is allowed by eBay feedback rules, and will not be removed.

Leaving negative feedback is mandatory. Not only you help others to recognize the cheater, but you also help to prove your point to PayPal/your CC, the police department, and others. Also it might help future class action lawsuit or legislation against eBay.

3. Decide what you want to do with the player - get your money back, or get a partial refund. Because getting your money back WILL require you - by the terms of PayPal or credit card company dispute rules - to pay the return shipping the item to the seller, getting a partial refund might be a better option. I also chose partial refund to have evinence in case the police needs it.

4. Get the seller contact info from eBay: http://pages.ebay.com/help/tp/know-seller-contact.html

5. Write a compain to eBay and PayPal. Here is what I wrote:

I have bought a fraudulent item <item> from the seller <seller>, which I have already reported to ebay. The seller could not be contacted in any way, including ebay messaging, emails and phone numbers. I have left negative feedback, have contacted Paypal for a refund, and now filing a complain to the seller law enforcement authorities.

I have strong suspicion that it is not a mistake, and the seller KNOWS that the players he sells are hacked. He have made his auctions private - and there is no real reason to do so while you sell a cheap MP3 player - and has strong negative feedback during the last several months.

I also know that several people have reported the fradulent activity of this seller to ebay, but the seller is still here, and even has his "power seller" status. And now I have to pay for return shipping, and I consider ebay fraud processing procedures partially liable for this. Contributing to the whole picture how eBay handles fraud, I cannot even report my item as "received not as described" to eBay, until 10 days passed, even if the seller refuses to contact! What is the reason, I don't know. Maybe you people thinks that there is a probability for the player to magically turn into 4Gb in those 10 days, do you?

Have to say, I am really disappointed of the level of consumer protection provided by eBay. I suspect that the real reason is that eBay just do not care about the seller selling fakes as long as eBay gets paid auction fees for every item sold. This is not a good business practice, and I hope you will do something to stop it.

6. Using the seller contact information (city and state), find the seller local police department, and write email/postal mail there (the example is for blown-z, so make sure you change the contact information, and the officer name):

Dear Chris Olson,

I am writing to report a fraud attempt committed against me, and committing against other people by a company, which was reported to me to be a Blaine, MN resident.

On Nov 09, 2006 I have bought an 4GB MP4/MP3 player on www.ebay.com from the seller with username blown-z, who represents the Supreme Solutions company (see the message in evidence/The item is won.msg). The item was paid (evidence/The item is paid.msg), and received on Monday, Nov 13, 2006.

The item was tested after receiving. The item worked, and showed that it has 4Gb of memory. However, being aware that some players are hacked to show more memory that they have, I ran a special test to reveal the true player memory capacity. As a result, the real amount of memory in this player was only 1Gb. This was not a malfunction - the item flash memory was intentionally modified to show higher amount of available memory that the device really has.

There are several things that make me believe that the company which sells those players on eBay knows that they are selling 1Gb players as 4Gb, and getting much higher price. I was not the first customer complaining about the
received player was hacked, and has much less memory that advertised. The company feedback page on www.ebay.com shows that several people reported the same problem just this month. Since the company started getting complains, they did not try to fix the pissue - instead they made their auctions private, making it much difficult to contact the buyer, who did not complain. There are no other reason to make auction private to sell cheap MP3 players - private auctions are mostly used to sell sensitive items, like adult toys, so the buyer does not want himself to be listed as a buyer. Clearly not a case for this player.

I have got the company contact details from ebay, contacted the company, and explained all the details about the fake player they sent to me. The company silently ignored me, no reply. And they still selling the same players on ebay, deceiving their customers, who may not have enough technical knowledge to check that the player has really as much memory as they paid for. Therefore I can only attempt to stop this fraud by reporting it to law enforcement.

Here is the contact information for Supreme Solutions I got from ebay (evidence/User blown_z contact information request.msg):

<put>

The player I bought is still in my posession. I am going to ship it back, but if you need it for your investigation, let me know, and I ship it to the Blaine police department with all the evidence you request.

I can be contacted by e-mail, phone number or via regular mail:

<put>
I certify that the facts I have reported are true to the best of my knowledge.

7. Write a postal mail to eBay CEO, Meg Whitman. It is very useful to show the volume of fraud around eBay, and I encourage everybody to do it:

To:
Meg Whitman CEO ebay
2145 Hamilton Avenue
San Jose, CA 95125

Dear Meg,

At <date> I have bought a 4Gb MP3/MP4 player (item #<number>) on eBay auction from the seller <seller>. 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.

8. Write a message to your attorney general and senators/congresspeople. So far the only reliable way I see to stop the fraud is to make auction sites like eBay responsible for their sellers. I haven't written a sample yet; if somebody has experience writing to the Offices, I'd like to get a sample, or probably a complete letter. I see the following key points:

- eBay does not care about fraud. Their current investigation time for a fraud report is about one month, while most fraud auctions are 1-day duration. They complain that "they have a large volume". Ask honest businesses, what do they do if the number of customer complains increase? They hire more people to investigate them, not making a month backlog.

- eBay directly benefits from the fraud. Every time the item is sold, eBay gets some money. If the item is returned to seller, and then sold again, eBay gets money again. This means that eBay has no reason to stop or even limit the amount of fraud on their auctions, because they directly benefit about it.

- Since eBay cannot do it, we need the law enforcement/legislative actions against eBay. To protect the general community, there should be a law making eBay directly responsible for the seller fraud.

- eBay is fighting auction seller licensing requirement; you can find the list of "pro/con" senators on their site. Send this information for everybody. Now I think this requlation would be really useful for large volume sellers.

Remember that we are the only who can stop it.