How to complain to the police about an eBay seller

This was quite a useful guide on eBay that I linked to from my 'I was scammed on eBay post'. Unfortunately it's been removed so i've just copied and pasted it here from the Google cache. Originally written by eBay member groundhog.day on the eBay reviews & guides section with the title 'How To Complain To The Police About A Seller'.

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It is an inevitable consequence of eBaying that from time to time you will encounter a rotten apple attempting to sour the whole barrel.

Although this is a relatively rare occurence it helps to know the best way to get the Police to take you seriously.

This is how I recommend folk approach the Police to report a seller they believe has behaved dishonestly.

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The first thing to do is to ring your local Police station and make an appointment to see a CID officer - don’t frustrate yourself by arguing your case with a desk clerk in reception - they are programmed to dismiss cases of non delivery as civil matters.

When you attend the Police station you will need to have hard copies of any emails you have received in relation to the auction, if possible make sure these emails display the headers. If you don’t know how to make headers show - ask, they’re important.

Print out a screen shot of the auction you won and add to it your proof of your payment.

You should also make sure that you can supply the Police with the user names of other winners, together with the item numbers of all the sales. You are building a case that can’t be dismissed as a civil matter - bear in mind that third party emails won’t be able to be accepted. In other words, emails forwarded to one member from another victim cannot be considered as part of your complaint so don’t waste time gathering them.

The Police Officer that you speak to will hopefully be aware of the intricacies of eBay - almost every Police Station now has at least one specialist Officer with knowledge of the site - however it is possible that they won't be available.

Just in case the detective you speak to isn't au fait with eBay, bring the contact details on the following page with you - he or she will need them to contact eBay.

http://pages.ebay.co.uk/safetycentre/law_enforcement.html

Once you have received a crime number be prepared to relay it to any of the other buyers who you are able to contact. They can add that information to the details they supply to the Officer who takes their report.

Whilst all this is ongoing you should, of course, continue with the relevant eBay standard protection claims.

Finally - be realistic about what you are hoping to achieve.

The wheels of justice are notoriously slow but they do turn and they will get there eventually so don‘t give up.

Good Luck.

:0)

Cybersquatters can redirect your users to porn

By ever so slightly misspelling a url or adding an incorrect .com when it should be .org there's a very high chance you'll end up looking at porn.

It's happened to me twice in the last two days.

First of all i was attempting to direct an IT colleague to www.videolan.org in order to download VLC media player and inadvertantly directed him to www.videoland.org, something very different.

Secondly i was meaning to type in the domain www.veganza.org to view the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster however i forgot the .org and typed in www.veganza.com and was yet again viewing naked ladies.

Now 'accidentally' looking at porn isn't the most painful experience you can have but with a computer screen that everyone in my open plan office can see, being caught viewing animated gifs and rotating flash graphics of unhygienic sex acts isn't a desired career move.

The only way to avoid this surreptitious adult surfing is obviously by being a bit more careful and possibly finding a website through Google so you can get a text preview before the onslaught of technicolour karma sutra.

Telling you how to not view porn isn't the point of this article though, what my recent experiences highlight is the importance of your url and how it's important to be aware of 'cybersquatters'.

"Cybersquatting, is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. The cybersquatter then offers to sell the domain to the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price."

The US Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act quoted on Wikipedia

There has been a number of high profile cases of this happening, notably to Harrods in 2001; they won the case and got the domains. Harrods is a big brand name and was seen as an easy target for cybersquatters of the early noughties but as the two examples at the beginning of this article show, anyone can be a victim of cybersquatting.

With 108,810,358 distinct websites and still counting even picking a domain name without standing on someone else's toes becomes tricky.

• So when picking a new domain name try and be original and have a look around. Are there sites with similar URLs that could confuse your users? If they are cybersquatters you may be able to evict them but if they have a genuine claim to that URL there's little you can do (bar pay for it like the BBC did).
• If you already have a domain name then have a check for cybersquatters on similar URLs
• If you're doing any link building make sure that when somebody links to your site they get the right domain name

By doing this you can hopefully make sure your users only look at porn when they want to.

Ebay scammer returns £110 in cash

I was scammed by an opportunist on eBay. I then employed some guerrilla tactics such as Google stalking and contacting his Mum to finally get the money back. Here is my story.

I bought some concert tickets on eBay back in October 2007. The concert wasn't until March 2008 so i wasn't expecting to receive the tickets until Jan/Feb 2008. The seller had a feedback rating of 548 with 97% positive.

I went back to eBay every month or so just to check on the seller. However when i did this at the beginning of January I discovered that the seller was no longer an eBay seller.

I emailed the seller to no response. I assumed that I wasn't going to be receiving tickets so i chased up eBay to see if i could claim a refund. Due to the fact that it had been over 60 days from the initial purchase i was informed by eBay that I'd left it too late to claim through them. They also informed me that the seller was no longer a registered eBay user.

I have personally checked our database and I can confirm that "theglens2857" is no longer a registered eBay user. This is because eBay suspended them for breached of policy... For privacy reasons I'm afraid I can't share details about another member's account.

eBay for reasons best known to themselves refuse to add a dispatch date to each product (or even just ticket sales) or restrict tickets to being sold within their 60 days which surely would prevent this problem. I did suggest this in my dispute email but got the standard 'Yeah right' response.

My only choices left were get the money back myself or contact the police. I figured I'd try the former option before resorting to the latter.

I had the seller's real name and address from the confirmation email eBay sent me on initial purchase and after a brief bit of Google searching i found his phone number, discovered that he lived with his parents and was probably a teenager.

I phoned up and got through to his mum and politely left a message asking him to call me.

I then sent him an email,

Hi Craig,

I bought some Cure tickets from you on eBay in October (ref no:12345) paying you £110 and am still awaiting the delivery of them.

Ebay informs me (see below) that you are no longer registered with them so the only
option I have is to deal with this myself. I rang your home number earlier today
and left a message with my phone number with your mum i believe.

Please can you let me know whether you are still sending the tickets (these have now been released so you should have them) or if not then refund me my £110. (pay the
money in paypal to my email address)

I'll give you another ring in a couple of days if i don't hear back.

Regards

On the bottom of this email I also forwarded my response from eBay and added in the following paragraph,

Your only option is to take this matter further with the police, eBay will gladly
help the police with their investigations if needed. Please ask the investigating
officer to email us by using the "report information to eBay" link on the
following page:
http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/tp/isgw-fraud-ebays-role.html

If he read the forwarded email i thought this might be a subtle hint to ensure he responded.

I then received this in response,

Hi
sorry i never got back to you sooner but as you know i am no longer a
registered member of ebay so i cant reply to your messages, please forward on
your address and i will get a cheque sent out to you at the end of the week

As my friend gZa cynically quoted to me, "And the cheque is in the mail, and I love you, and..." - see the full quote on imdb (from the film 'To Live and Die in L.A.') .

Unsurprisingly no cheque arrived in the post (yes, I love you) so i then sent the following email, at the same time i also emailed other purchasers in order to gather information for a potential police investigation.

Hi,

I haven't received any cheque in the post. Did you send anything last week?
It should have arrived by now. I'm now contacting ebay to get all the relevant
details for the investigating officer. From experience this takes a couple of
days so if you've already sent a cheque or send one now then it will arrive by
the end of this week and I'll cancel the investigation. Either way let me know.

Regards,

An hour later the following arrived in my inbox (from a different email address) ,

refund sent today special delivery should be with you before noon tomorrow
tracking number ZV588452251GB

I checked the tracking number and it was genuine, the following day an envelope arrived to my house containing £110 in cash.

Although initially annoyed at being scammed like the fool i am I'm now finding it all rather amusing (probably because I'm no longer short by £110).

Here is what this experience has taught me:

• If you're buying concert tickets make sure they are being delivered to you within 60 days, if you don't receive them make sure you start a 'dispute' on eBay BEFORE the 60 days are up irrelevant of what the seller may tell you (they're in the post / i love you etc.)
• If in the end you do have to resort to the police here's a good guide on how to report fraud on eBay.
  
• Then write a blog article about your experience, it's particularly cathartic. This guy also had the same concert ticket issue, he actually contacted the police though.

If this doesn't work and you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can try scamming the scammer...

7 top tips to avoid email spam, phishing and fraud

As the web gets more sophisticated so does phishing (fraudsters trying to gain your personal information through masquerading as a trusted source).

One of my colleagues recently received the below spam/phishing email:

Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2007 19:18:58 +0800
From: Mars.zhou@netinchina.org.cn
To:
Subject: Domain names of Shedshow (to CEO)

Dear CEO,

We are the domain name registration organization in China, which mainly deal with international company's in china. We have something important need to confirm with your company.

On the Dec5, 2007, we received an application formally. One company named "Jufeng Holdings Limited" wanted to register following

Domain names:

shedshow.cn
shedshow.com.cn
shedshow.com.hk
shedshow.com.tw
shedshow.hk
shedshow.mobi
shedshow.net
shedshow.net.cn
shedshow.org.cn
shedshow.tw

Internet brand keyword:

shedshow

through our body.

After our initial examination, we found that the keywords and domain names applied for registration are as same as your company's name and trademark. These days we are dealing with it. If you do not know this company, we doubt that they have other aims to buy these domain names. Now we have not finished the registration of Jufeng company yet, in order to deal with this issue better, Please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.

Best Regards,

Mars zhou

China Net Technology Limited
Tel:+(852)-3059-3057
Fax:+(852)-3059-3080
Email: Mars.zhou@netinchina.org.cn

Web: http://www.netinchina.org.cn

A quick web search on some of the sentences within this email revealed other people who'd received this and replied, in many cases with quite shocking results (read the article comments). This forum also linked to in the above article features more people who've encountered this particular scam.

But what if you don't realise it's spam? In fact before this email was brought to my attention one of my colleagues had replied (any further emails i receive from these scammers i will be ignoring and deleting).

It's very easy to get duped. So, 7 top tips to avoid being scammed:

1. Do you know the company / person emailing you?
   
   • If you answer 'no' to this question then this is where you should question the email's credibility.
2. Do some research - the first hit i found on Google for "China Net Technology Limited scam" was somebody who'd received the same email.
3. Does the email ask you to take action / spend money? - if 'yes', beware
   
4. Can all the information they've included in the email be gained without knowing you? - if 'yes', beware
   
5. Speak to people you know - if the email talks about domain names then contact your domain provider. If they ask for bank details contact your bank (using the number you know, not the number that may be in the scam email). If they ask to confirm your Paypal details contact Paypal (again not from links in the spam email but via the Paypal website).
6. Beware lookalikes - It's very easy to make something look genuine online, for example a scammer could buy lloydstsb.org (as opposed to the real lloydstsb.com) to pretend to be your bank.
7. Calm down - it may seem obvious but a genuine bank request or a genuine domain enquiry won't ask for immediate response and won't do so buy email, more likely than not they'll go through more official channels and post a letter to your home address or alert you when you log in to your ebanking or domain account (again using the URL you know NOT one in an email).

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