September 21st, 2007 
Jenny How A fraud is defined as “perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage.” And I bet most of us heard of the most common fraud of all – credit card frauds.
Besides credit cards, there are numerous other kinds of frauds when dealing online. A transaction which contains any intention, no matter how small, to deceive, is a fraud.
The followings are some common fraud you could be facing when you are dealing on the internet particularly eBay.
Fraud committed by sellers:
1. Shipping faulty items or parts and never acknowledge buyer about it.
2. Shill bidding on own accounts.
3. Dispatching items which are not as described.
4. Selling stolen goods.
5. Selling counterfeits or replicas.
6. Receiving payments but not shipping items.
Where are the Cyber Polices to put all online fraudster to jail?
Fraud committed by buyers:
1. File a dispute to Paypal allegedly claiming items are broken, never arrive or not as described for payment reversal.
2. Using stolen credit cards or suspicious bank account for payment.
3. Forge a copy of Paypal payment email and sent to seller. Seller may not examine thoroughly and ship item.
4. Sending bad Checks, Money Orders and Cashiers Checks.
So, you see, fraud are not only committed by sellers. As an eBay seller, we are also at risk of getting conned by buyers.
Online fraud are by far the hardest to track and scammers rarely get caught. When a buyer file a dispute to Paypal, I usually find that Paypal works in favour of the buyer. There is little a seller can do sometimes.
An online seller could be at risks as much as a a buyer too.
Do you know that over 176,000 complaints were lodged with the FTC in 2006 relating to Internet fraud; an increase of 16,000 over 2005? The two most common age groups reporting online fraud were 30 – 39 and 40 – 49 at 24% each. Statistics for 2007 are not out yet though.
Here is a full 92 page on statistics of online and offline frauds (PDF) by FTC.
If you have any experiences or stories pertaining to ebay, online or internet fraud, please share us your comments.
Tags: fraud, scam, ebay, auction, internet
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Jenny,
One more to add to fraud committed by sellers:
Shipping stuff with correct casing but non-spec compliant internal part
I really hate this type of strategy…but how many of us open the casing and check the internals ???
I must be very blessed! I’ve been selling and buying on eBay for almost 4 years now and so far no fraud. I’ve had to file for non-payment which goes with the territory, but nothing horrendous thank goodness!
#3 would seriously suck
Gosh… I did not know there are so many ways which are considered as fraud cases. What I know is that some of the accessories are purposely taken out from a package deal and sell separately in the market.
hi jenny, thanks for all the wonderful posts on ebay! I would have love to make money on ebay but due to circumstances I am unable to handle it. Anyway still learning about ebay trading from you and thanks for sharing.
I never bid on ebay but had bad experience on Lelong! Somehow I feel that on Lelong there is very little control over frauds! Also I suspect that there are lots of foul play there!
Now that is all just scary. You have to be really careful with everything that you do online. Fraud is on the rise every where. There are so many people out there trying to steal you hard earned earnings and that really gets me upset when I hear of it. I pray I will not be a victim of fraud.
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