No, this post has nothing to do with the early 1970’s song by The Who, but to the bad practices by some on eBay. You may remember a previous post last week when I got caught by a fake seller. My, I suppose it’s greed, led me to purchase an item that turned out to be from a compromised site. The good news is that I got a refund more or less the following day.

Well, today was something different. I am nearly ready for some more ink for my printer. I tend to buy it from the same seller each time. It’s a competitive price and the seller send me an envelope so that the empty cartridges can be recycled. So I was checking to see if his price was indeed a good bargain and looked at the ‘suggestions’ at the bottom of the page. They all seemed to be in roughly the same price bracket of between £18.00 and £20.00. Then I spotted one at £5.00! It was being sold, supposedly by a well renowned and respected seller called Car****ge K**G. The stupid thing was that at the side of, what I knew to be a fake, was cartridges sold by the genuine Car***ge K**G selling at £19.49. After about 10 minutes hunting around the site and a quick search on Google, I was able to locate the method of reporting the seller.

This difference this time was that the seller had set-up a fake profile and used images from the genuine seller. Whereas the previous time, the genuine account had been compromised. I’m told that both methods are so easy to do. For a compromised site, it is usually a site that has not been used for a while. Maybe set-up to make a single private sale and never used again. The second method, anyone can do. You simply set-up an account and start conning people.

Note to eBay: maybe have a look at some price comparisons. You may be surprised.