[michiganjfrog]

Originally Posted by HubbleMart";p=&quot

It is sad that the list of suckers is endless, and a new one is goind down every minute!

With the new true 4GB clones in production, seems like it might get worse before it gets better. You would think that eBay would smarten themselves up a little and not resort to waiting for the government intervention and class action suits to roll in, because greedy as they are, they don't seem to realize this scam is affecting their bottom line. I've seen the underthread of loss of faith from eBay customers who once had some faith in the eBay system, and are turning away from dealing with or buying on eBay because its no longer trustworthy and they dont feel protected. The worst thing for eBay is to be faced with massive rumours of an unstable unsafe marketplace.... which is happening I feel on account of this mp4 scam and other things.

Though I am in not an ebay lover, and myself had a very tough time with them as i was trying to warn people about the Scam, & they suspended my account, and made me loose the entire christmas sale. But somehow, I still find it hard to believe that ebay would be in on this. Look at it this way - the scammers are contributing maybe about $20 million a year to ebay & paypal combined. This is only about 0.33% of ebay's revenues. They have much more to loose in the form of reputation than gain in this.

Well, you're the first I've heard who's saying eBay / Paypal isn't making that much money in the mp4 scam. I wonder how much it would actually be relative to... say, the cocaine trade? And if $20 mil (which still seems a little low from other guesstimates I've seen) is only .33% of eBay's yearly revenue, I wonder how long it will be before they can buy and sell the US government and others? Even more reason to be concerned!

I'm not saying they're "officially" in on the scam. I don't mean they meet in secret with the heads of the Chinese mafia in how best to organize the mass-scale fraud on the global consumer (of course, I have no proof that they don't...). But look at it this way: you said yourself they actually suspended you when all you were doing was trying to warn others in the so-called "ebay community" of this scam, and prevent them from being ripped off! If they put customers first, they wouldn't do that. Plus, suspending you, a seller, hurts their bottom line. Seems that's not a concern because they have a bigger bottom line... the money they're reaping from this scam. Why did they initially give the entire country of China free listing fees? Why didn't they instigate aggressive programs to stop the fraud after seeing a deluge of fraudulence on eBay due to the Chinese market opening up (it was a lot harder to buy fake Chinese goods before....). Seems the only thing they did was allow a few people to write eBay guides warning others of some of the fraud. Guides which you can't edit after a time.... (and who knows how many such guides they removed).

When a customer complains about being ripped off, eBay says on the one hand they don't get involved between seller and buyer... WHEN it is convenient for them to say so. When their sellers or bottom line is being threatenened however, they certainly WILL get in between, they do so in many instances. When AlbertaSatellite here tried to warn others about the MP4 scam, they pulled his ads and threatened him with suspension. Why? They didn't want to say, exactly. Preferring it seems, to have him guess so that they can justify going ahead with the suspension for next time, when he gets it wrong. I couldnt see a reason myself, since although he was selling "information in a digital form", I'd seen dozens of such "items" being sold before on eBay. I think we concluded it was because he used the word "Nano" in his ad, when he wasn't selling a Nano. Well, guess who else uses the words "Nano" and "iPod" in their ad? Yup, about 50,000 eBay sellers selling Nano clones.

There are all -kinds- of events that point to the fact that eBay is turning a blind eye to the scam. They give people the royal brush-off when they send letters to eBay, Meg Whitman even, complaining about the size of the scam, and the nature of it, pointing to the mountain of evidence that it is very real and very costly to consumers. My point is, they don't have to officially be "in on it" to officially profit enormously from the MP4 scam, and be "unofficially" in on the scam. They simply have to let it run rampant in their marketplace and do scratch all about it, letting the consumer be the one to protect himself. eBay purports (more like "lies") about people being safe if they stick to buying on eBay, and not engage in "unsafe practices" like dealing directly with a seller (thereby circumventing eBay's profits of the scam).

They say this in every message you send through their system. They even insist you have no choice but to buy a seller's product through eBay, and that you must use their email system. Well, if that's the case, then you would think that the least eBay would do to protect consumers is to stop ripping them off A SECOND TIME, by charging a $25US min. deductible for consumers who've been defrauded by products like MP4 players with less than advertised mem. capacities. If eBay makes so much money as you allege, then all the money they make can certainly be put toward paying for their own processing of fraud claims, instead of making a FURTHER profit off the consumer for the processing of fraud claims. Particulary since they admit by their own words they have an underfunded fraud investigation dept. (For a company who makes so much money, fraud does not appear to be a top priority...).

To my mind, the second part of The Great MP4 Scam is the fact that very few people, even those who've been scammed, are thinking in terms of eBay not simply doing nothing to prevent the scam, but ACTUALLY BEING PART OF THE MP4 SCAM TRADE. But since eBay have been made aware of this major problem and have reacted with indifference, who's to say that they are not taking advantage of the defraudation of consumers, whether directly or indirectly?

Secondly, if the scammers were 100% stopped, ebay would not loose. The average selling price of the products would go higher, thereby generating more revenues for ebay. yes maybe 10 or 15% of people who are buying the fakes today, would not buy from ebay due to the higher cost, but I think in the end it would all even out.

If in one second you took out all of those listings that contain fraudulent MP4 players (I think "fraudulent" is a little more accurate than "fake", because "fake" implies they're just copies of the Nano and everyone knows that!), well a major portion of the listings would disappear. Could this be evened out by the higher sales figures for the proper non-fraudulent items? I argue that it wouldn't. And I'll bet that eBay has probably already worked that out in their accounting dept. and figured that it wouldn't either. As I have said before within these pages, and probably in my eBay guide, it would be VERY EASY for eBay to instantly eliminate most of the MP4 fraud in a second. At least up until recently, that is.

All they have to do is disallow any Nano clones over 2GB, just as they did with human hearts and such. They're not doing that, arguing that you can't know whether such players contain 2GB or 4GB+ memory, and anyway, they're not experts on MP4 players and simply don't know. It's called "pretending to be stupid". I pointed out in my eBay guide that yes you CAN know which Nano clones are fraudulent and which are not. You simply have to look at the ones that say "4GB" or more. I also pointed to the COMPLETE LACK OF EVIDENCE that there are any 4GB+ Nano clones on the market, and to sites like this that have documented evidence these players are fake, and no evidence that any of the 4GB+ Nano clones have that much nand flash.

I also argued that given this unique situation, it should be up to the sellers to PROVE that their players are indeed 4GB+. Instead of eBay/Paypal asking every decent, honest consumer who got ripped off by EVERY ONE OF THESE 4GB+ Nano Clones, to pay for "professional verification" and prove it to eBay/Paypal. Has eBay pulled all the 4GB+ auctions since publishing my guide-slash-exposé? Nope. Which leads us back to the evidence that they don't want to, for the sake of greed.

Anyway, the point is that we should find a way to stop the scammers.

There's been many good ways to do so, talked about here. But note that we're not just fighting the scammers, we also have to fight eBay at the same time, because they're on the side of the scammers more than they are on the side of the consumers or even the good sellers. For example.... you can go to a lot of trouble to design a certification program of your own (without eBay's input) for sellers to show consumers that they are dealing with a seller who doesn't sell fraudulent players, complete with certification logo. Then big bad eBay Corp. can come along, notice all these logo's on peoples pages, and tell you to can the logo or get booted off their system. They've already done that to Paypal competitors in the past, not allowing certain logos or methods of payment.