In February I bid on an item on eBay but the bid was not sufficient to win. On the following day I received a message appearing to come from eBay requesting that I contact the seller. The message, which I have now concluded is a type of phishing, gave payment instructions for using PayPal or Western Union and appeared to be legitimate. It turns out this was the first message of 20 messages and they came from 20 different people, all offering to sell the same item, all purporting to have eBay interceding. Unfortunately I responded to the first message and although the loss is small, I believe eBay is at fault because they somehow participated in these eMailers obtaining bidder information.
EBay has a mechanism for reporting fraud, but you can only report types of fraud they want to hear about. Every fill-in box concerning the type of fraud or security issue must be filled using a drop-down menu and if your problem doesn't fit, too bad. EBay does not communicate. When trying to send a copy of the information to eBay it has to be in text form, as no attachments are accepted. There is no way they can properly evaluate the fraud threat without seeing the eMail that they purportedly sent, and there is no way for me to know that someone in there organization did not send the eMail.
How did the 20 people who sent me eMail know my eMail address?
How did they know on which item I was bidding?
Why does eBay ignore my eMail messages?
There is no disclaimer on the eBay web site informing the consumer that deals outside the bidding channels are not legitimate, an activity that occurs on other web auction sites. Then again, maybe it is legitimate. Who knows? EBay does not seem to care or even be interested. I provided telephone numbers, my eMail address, and other information so I cold be contacted for further details and the information seems to have fallen into a big black hole. I will place odds that I am not the only one to have this problem but there is no venue available to report or record the event.
The ripoff? EBay released bidder information or assisted in perpetuating this fraud, and they are not interested in finding out about the problem despite their outward appearance of concern.
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