eevBLAB 109 - Ebay Test Equipment SCAM

[EEVblog]

Here is how an ebay scam works, watch out for it! In this case, it's high value test equipment.

[wmill3]

Hi Dave:

Thanks for bringing this up.  I have reporting this person to Ebay for the past several years. He has been using the same MO for quite a while now. He will post these listing for test equipment and items like Rolex watches. Reported him twice this past week. Ebay will take him down then within 24 hours he is back again. Report him again and then he is gone for two to three weeks. I now have a Word doc that I copy from for the text on the report and then put the item number for one of his listings.

Again thanks for bringing this to everyone's attention.

Thanks

Bill

[nctnico]

Nice you took the time to click through it all. The bank account likely belongs to a 'mule' (a person that receives money into her/his bank account and gets to keep a commission).

In the Netherlands it is possible to reverse transactions made into these kind of scam bank accounts without needing a court order nowadays.

[langwadt]

The bank account likely belongs to a 'mule' (a person that receives money into her/his bank account and gets to keep a commission).

and shortly after the police knocks on the door and the mule is now a criminal ...

[langwadt]

Nice you took the time to click through it all. The bank account likely belongs to a 'mule' (a person that receives money into her/his bank account and gets to keep a commission).

In the Netherlands it is possible to reverse transactions made into these kind of scam bank accounts without needing a court order nowadays.

that would require the money still be in the account

[EEVblog]

Nice you took the time to click through it all. The bank account likely belongs to a 'mule' (a person that receives money into her/his bank account and gets to keep a commission).

Possible. In this case the mule was living in a very nice house indeed.

[tggzzz]

This technique is depressingly common, and is migrating to lower value items. Yesterday's example was for an HP8478B thermistor mount.

Tell-tales, apart from the low price:

• that image directing people not to bid
• the mule account never having sold test equipment in the past

Action: report the item to fleabay choosing the options for a fraudulent item.

When I tried that with the 8478, someone had beaten me to it, since fleabay refused to accept a report for a non-existent item. Ah, the unavoidable joys of "eventual consistency" in large distributed systems.

[thm_w]

If ebay wanted to deal with this issue, in a serious way, they could. This exact scam has been going on for years, similar scams for decades.
Its fine if you want to report the scams, but to me its a waste of time. Let them deal with the root of the problem.

Also, they won't tell you anything when items are deleted or warn that it was a scam listing. I get that, as they don't want to hurt their reputation, but, if they had a warning as to why the listed was deleted, it could catch buyers who are about to fall for the scam.

Action: report the item to fleabay choosing the options for a fraudulent item.

As the youtube comments say: report the item as "Listing practices -> Offer to buy or sell outside of ebay -> listing states buyer can purchase outside of ebay". If you want them to care.

[CNe7532294]

Things like this is hardly why I bother with eBay. I'm quite fortunate to be able to just go to places that use test equipment in DFW (AT&T is big here + military related companies like L3 and Raytheon), Austin ("New Silicon Valley"), or Houston (NASA and oil) in person. Someone warned the HP/Agilent group about this during the holidays. https://groups.io/g/HP-Agilent-Keysight-equipment/message/130855?p=%2C%2C%2C20%2C0%2C0%2C0%3A%3Acreated%2C0%2Ctis+the+season%2C20%2C2%2C0%2C95354866



The other problem is what Dave showed.....

Regular buyers adding items to the watch list. I'm 100% sure there is data collection and an algorithm of sorts somewhere that statistically determines not only that you will buy an item but for how much so that the prices can be driven up with the hope of buying low. If all social media websites and ad companies get constantly criticized for data collection of their user's data for monetary gain (rightly so), you can bet your entire life savings eBay is the same way. YouTube as everyone knows (thanks to Dustin from SmarterEveryDay) takes this further by employing an algorithm to "watch every single pixel and listen to every word" against a databank containing genuine copyrighted content (i.e. major movie titles like The Avengers) and a black list of words/phrases to ensure copyright enforcement and bans. Possibly even shadow banning controversial content as well (i.e. firearm+3d print content).

Citation here:

As the icing on the cake to all this data collection, no one from the company themselves to the users or sellers (all possibly employing 100s to 1000s of people) is safe from cyber threats like outright brute force hacks to phishing emails. To put it this way, that data has traded so many hands it only takes one person making a single unintended mistake (i.e. socially engineered phishing email asking to click a pdf or check tracking for shipping) to break it's security.

TL;DR: A massive protip is to just search manually on something like Google (even this is sketchy for the future if not already, maybe more like an "archive.org" for listings like https://picclick.com/ but how I use it is searching google with [insert item here] picclick.com click cached page) "religiously" for a true low priced buy of an item you desire that isn't pushed to unobtanium thanks to said data collection and lucrative algorithms. I only have watch later for items that I plan to sell so I can gauge the market for a FMV asking price. As always, stay safe and vigilant. Direct money transfers without knowing the seller's permanent residence is 100% a scam.

[AndyBeez]

Great piece of investigative journalism 

@eevblog: Did you trace route back to the IP from where that fake-bay site was sending traffic?

Ebay is contaminated with scam, fake and manipulative listings, on an industrial scale. Reporting fake listings can only go so far. Ebay is not a real person, but a corporate conglomerate where problem ownership is never an option. This is not the place to complain though. Neither it seems are eBay's own user forums

One thought: If the bank account is in the United States then is attempted Wire Fraud, which falls under the auspices of the FBI. For players who live state-side, you can report fraudulent cyber activity to the Feds via their Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). A complaint/reporting form can be found here: https://www.ic3.gov 

[helius]

This particular type of scam is run like clockwork and the "tells" are always the same. Not only that one of the item pictures is a jpeg of text, but also in the description section: the item name, buy it now price, and stock number is also a jpeg and not copyable as text. This is done to make it harder to flag the listings using automated tools, and it apparently works since it has been going on for nearly 20 years.

If eBay really cared about their users being victimized by this type of scam, they could have stopped it eons ago. But running OCR on description images to flag this behavior would eat into their profits, I guess. They would rather wash their hands of it, Pilates style.

I have never engaged the scammers like Dave did in the video, but the next part of the process relies on the fact that you allow the display of HTML emails. We have known that HTML emails facilitate phishing since the Clinton administration.

[aduinstat]

I'm glad I saw this. I think the FSW85 may be a little too nice to be on ebay (not that I can afford it lol), but this seller had other listings that were tempting.