Caught in the Middle

What is the punch line in all of this, all these misadventures and shenanigans? I am sincerely torn between cynicism and empathy.

They say that gullible, greedy, and gormless are the 3 ingredients that make a person a victim: thinking, believing, and acting on the idea of "something for nothing", and willing to close their eyes to reality to continue to believe it, until they break the "victim" cycle.

Have you ever heard that you cannot cheat an honest man? The idea, of course, is that if you offer an item for half price to an honest man, his concern for who may be losing out to create the discount is what renders him immune to the bargain, and therefore the risk of getting nothing for something.

The Really Sad Part

eBay promotes itself as a nice, safe, fun place to shop and to sell off your own old widgets, and the pay Google to drive traffic to eBay. So, when I google up "toaster" because I want to buy one, ebay listings come up in the results. One fellow who had never been on eBay before found one of my items for sale. He is a professional who simply wants to buy a tool for his business, and he was escorted into the eBay swamp where the alligators lie in wait: the unethical sellers and the outright thieves.

Does he want to spend a week learning about the hazards lurking on eBay, or does he just want his widget? He was not suspicious of me (and he had no reason to be). I was cautious of a new buyer (registered today) of an expensive item. He used the domain e-mail of his real business, and offered to pay by bank wire transfer. I once used my domain e-mail on eBay and I swear there is an entire industry based on selling every e-mail address you can scrounge, because it was the beginning of an onslaught of SPAM that has continued unabated.

Sending a bank wire transfer accelerates the transaction and the delivery of the item, and if you are dealing with a reputable seller, there is no problem. It is now extremely difficult to identify the crooks, and so I cannot lay all the responsibility on the victim, as the cynic in me would love to do.

A buyer new to eBay posted her dilemma: she believed eBay; she believed PayPal (when they conned her into using funds from her bank account, to that PP save on credit card fees); she believed the seller would deliver (supported by her trust in eBay and PayPal, an effort on which they expend far more effort than they do on providing service and protecting/defending their customers). She lost $700, received nothing, and to add insult to injury, PayPal offered her $175 in compensation.

Something has to give somewhere, and I am not the only person who has predicted the demise of eBay as a result of the misguided attempts at keeping it clean. In the back of my mind, I do not expect to happen what appears to be inevitable: that the rot on eBay will infect and destroy it. The worse it gets, the bigger it gets, with an incredible number of new arrivals daily: fresh meat for the thieves to plunder.

The Cynic

It requires a type of mental discipline to remind myself that the person who is complaining about a few dollars of postage is not the same person who sent $800 to Asia by wire transfer (based on an offer, to a Web-mail address, from a scenario that screams of fraud, with so many red flags that the bull cannot be far behind). Collectively, however, it paints an interesting picture of the two being one and the same person. This contributes to a cynical approach. Hey, why are "you" complaining about $2.00 on a bargain purchased and received, when "you" sent $500.00 and received nothing!?

I cannot recall an actual instance (but I do have one person in mind), but I believe that somewhere in our psyche is the ability to carry on over a few dollars in postage, and manage to forget the time we were 100% robbed! The seller who made $2.00 on the postage may have spent it on eBay and PayPal fees, and may have (most buyers fail to mention this when they complain) sent you an item worth many times what you paid.

The seller who delivers is subject to abuse from buyers in a permanent feedback history, but the scammer takes the money, runs, and comes back with a new identity for their next attack. To gain access to the history and profile of an honest seller, account hijacking is now very popular, and all of this put together requires a buyer on eBay to exercise extreme caution.

The Punch Line

The discussion boards (more so in Canada than in the US), are a "friendly place" to get help, share ideas, joke, and share a coffee. But, of course, like in the rest of eBay, the boards are invaded by the unsavory types that the "community" tries to defend itself from. I had to stop taking OP (original post/original poster) at face value, as one after another presented their sad story, only to be discovered to be the problem, the crook. A buyer of costume jewelry and seller of real jewels (the same person, buying junk and reselling it as authentic) bemoaned the lack of integrity of her buyer who had the nerve to want a refund.

As I write this, I have 2 topics fresh in my mind: one from a buyer of software code who wanted to know if she could change the name to hers and sell it as her own (ask me how I feel about theft of intellectual property); the other from a wanna-be seller (with feedback up near 800) inquiring about whether he would be allowed to offer for sale counterfeit items that he intended to purchase (full knowing they were fakes) and offer for resale (as fakes, I would presume, or at least hope). That is where we have gotten to: how's the market for fakes and can I get away with it?

As regrettable as this is, neither buyer nor seller can afford to be any degree of naive or trusting.