A MarketPlace of Ideas

I will be adding rules here that you can cut and paste into your ebay auctions to prevent being scammed by international Ebay / PayPal scammers.  You should read the previous articles if you have not yet to understand this 3rd installment

Article 1:   http://www.amarketplaceofideas.com/ebay-paypal-quick-spin-international-payment-turn-around-scam.htm

Article 2:   ebay appears to sweep fraud under the rug.

All buyers outside of the USA must meet the following requires to bid: 

1- You must have been a member of eBay for more than 1 year and have transactions in your feedback profile dating back one year.

2- Your feedback profile must meet one of the following conditions

    * 25 points feedback at 100%

    * 50 points feedback at 98% or better

3- If you do not meet conditions 1 or 2 I will not accept PayPal in payment

4- If you have 100 feedback points or less then the maximum package value shipped will be limited to XXX USD amount.

Quick spin scammers eventually get their current account shut down by ebay.  The course of events goes as follows.

1- make a new ebay account Username / profile : you can use the same NAME and ADDRESS you did before. As shown in a previous article 

Dmitriy Kovalivnich
49-17 Zelinskogo st.
Mariupol, Donetsk 87556 Ukraine          ……was used 3 times!! Ebay just lets this guy keep registering.

2- Quickly buy 10 - 30 items. Tends to be small items like memory because people ship them quickly because they are easy to pack and small packages do not get as much attention in customs.

3- Pay using PayPal.

4- As far as I have been told the time window the scammer has to work with is 1 month. He must buy as much as possible before the one month is up.  If he waits more than one month PayPal will not refund his payment.  Thus at the end of 1 month he will generally start reversing PayPal payments.  At this point many times we goofy americans may have already thought it was safe to leave feedback.  This is why all feedback should not be placed till a minimum of 6 weeks after receiving payment.

5- Once the scammer reverses enough payments Ebay / PayPal axis will shut the profile down.  ( But not the Name / Address !!!! )  Thus the scammer can only usually get a profile with 20 ish points.  Much longer and he will either get shut down or a negative feedback that says WATCH OUT, HE’S A SCAMMER.   This is why if a user shows any signs of bad traits I put them through the wringer.  I’d rather take the possible bad feedback than give them a single dime ! 

It turns out that if you specify WIRE TRANSFER or concealed cash eBay will cancel your listing.   Thus you must not state that those are the only thing you will accept. However when they inevitably email you is the time to tell the potential buyer that you will only accept these.

I have a set of behaviors that I can’t put in an article like this as it will educate the scammers on how to be better con men.  However I am willing to consult anyone who would email me. I still will not tell why I make any decisions but if you provide me with the answers to all my questions I will be able to access your risk accurately.

If you have not used Panoramio yet it allows you to upload landscape / metroscape pictures to the website at http://www.panoramio.com/    After you have uploaded the photos you can enter coordinates or use google mapping functions to plot the points on Google Earth.  Then other users can view your photos and get a more down to earth view of various points on the globe.

Ok ….so naturally the no brainer conclusion is that cameras will soon have GPS function built in to log photo locations so you can connect the camera to your pc and pipe the photo / position data directly into the database.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Google funded the development effort ( or already is funding !!! ).  Open source among other things means you work for Google whether you know it or not !

Er ok 10 minute after writing about this great invention I found this camera that has GPS capability with an added card: http://www.ricohzone.com/gps/

This is a story told to me by a professor when I was doing my masters degree at ASU.

I was in a class called “Signal Detection Theory” taught by my favorite professor of all time Doug Cochran.  He was an eminently fair guy and a real sweetheart when it came to any issues regarding classes.  A couple of weeks before the final he announced in class that if you were happy with your grade thus far that you did not have to take the final exam. You would be credited with the grade you had going at the time of the announcement.  Lest you think one could stop going to the class that was not the case.  There was a final project due at the scheduled time of the final.  I had an A so of course I could only lose by taking the final.  Thus I opted out.

Some of the Indian fellows in the class had B’s and were not satisfied with their grades.  Thus they went to Professor Cochrans office and the conversation when like this.

With Indian Accent: Sir I have a B.

Cochran: Ok well what do you want to do?

With Indian Accent: Oh Sir, we do not want to take the final

Cochran: Ok then your grade will be a B.

With Indian Accent: Oh sir but we want an A.

Cochran: Ok then take the final and get your grade up.

With Indian Accent: Oh Sir, we do not want to take the final

Cochran: Ok then your grade will be a B

With Indian Accent: Oh sir we do not want a B

……. and so on until they Indian fellows got tired.

In order to understand this article you will need to read this first:

Ebay PayPal Quick Spin International Payment Turn Around Scam

Now that you have read that article I will proceed to show how Ebay and PayPal appear to cover up the fraud and re-register the same guy using the same name and address so he can repeat his fraud !!!! The Ebay ID’s and addresses used are shown below:

anlogvins  He only got 2 feedback entries with this one. Indicates he got less this round. However the time gap between HIGHOBELISK and this id is so long I have to assume there were at least 3 other IDs that he used.
highobelisk After the Alexrokoma ID ebay was emailed by a reader with all the relevant information including a link to all 3 articles. They were asked what Dmitriy Kovalivnich’s new ID was and if they were going to shut this guy down. Their answer was (paraphrasing ) … “we can not give out personal information”. The question was rephrased and ebay was asked if they were going to reregister him. Again “we can not give out personal information”. They may not give out personal information but they sure to give out other peoples personal MONEY !!!!

…..I was informed by a reader commenting that highobelisk was his new ID only after the ID was shut down. If you can confirm any of the relevant information please get in contact !!!

alexrokoma - UpDate: 9-16-07: This ID = NO LONGER A REGISTERED USER, What name will ebay allow him to register under this time????

Address used:

His address is still:
Dmitriy Kovalivnich
49-17 Zelinskogo st.
Mariupol, Donetsk
87556
Ukraine

borisbursh ( 11)

Address used:

Dmitriy Kovalivnich
49-17 Zelinskogo st.
Mariupol, Donetsk 87556 Ukraine

rterehov

Address used:

Dmitriy Kovalivnich
49-17 Zelinskogo st.
Mariupol, Donetsk 87556
Ukraine
0235682365

Each time this guy reverses the payment on his sellers and gets the products without paying for them as detailed in the linked article above. Each time Ebay lets this guy re register using the same NAME and ADDRESS.

If you actually spot something wrong with this guy as I did in March ‘07 and email ebay about it they send you a nasty gram that reads as follows:

Thank you for writing into eBay. My name is Odessa, and I will be more
than happy to assist you with your concerns regarding item #XXXXXXXXXX,
won by the member .I did review your report and noticed that the member has increased their
feedback to 2.Please understand that once your listing ends with a winning bid, you
are obligated to complete the transaction unless the buyer fails to meet
the terms stated in your listing (such as payment method) or you cannot
authenticate the buyer’s identity. As the seller, you cannot refuse to
complete a transaction if the item does not reach the desired sale price
or if other circumstances arise that cause you to reconsider the sale.
More information on your responsibilities as a seller can be found in
Section 5.2 of the eBay User Agreement at: http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/user-agreement.htmlFailing to deliver an item after a listing has ended may result in
negative feedback as well as a Non-Selling Seller warning against your
account if the buyer reports this transaction to eBay. Wooooo his feedback has increased to 2 !! Thanks ebay, what would I do without you?

Not only is Ebay criminally negligent in this matter by re registering the same scammer 2 times with the same name and address but it appears they try to bury the matter. To see why I say this follow through the following steps as a demonstration of this burial process:

EXPERIMENT:

1- Bring up a new browser window and log into your ebay account.

WHY? = This is necessary so you can do an ADVANCED SEARCH.

2- Navigate to ADVANCED SEARCH - on the left hand side click on ITEMS BY BIDDER

3- Cut and paste the following names one by one into the search entry blank and perform the search

alexrokoma borisbursh rterehov

RESULTS:

alexrokoma : This search works as of 8/24/2007 because the ebay ID is still active and returns a link to the feedback profile.

borisbursh : Feature UnAvailable: This feature is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope to have it available again soon.

rterehov : Feature UnAvailable:This feature is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope to have it available again soon.

Soon alexrokoma will be disabled and it will be visible for a short while until it winks out like borisbursh and rterehov did.

Now we are to the suspicious part. While you can not find the previous profiles used by this scammer using Ebay’s user search function you can still view the profiles. Click on the links below:

alexarokoma

borisbursh

rterehov

I have included alexarokoma because of the eventually disabling of the profile that ebay will do as he goes through his 3rd wave of fraud. ( to my knowledge …..I am sure there is more but ebay isn’t going to allow me to find out how many times he’s used the same name and address )

In order to allow you to see the shut down profiles I have reconstructed the query string that retrieves the user feedback profile from the ebay database. The only way this is possible is because I ALREADY know the ID’s he performed this scam with previously. If I did not know these ID’s there would be no way of retrieving the information. Ebay still knows about this guy. Yet they re-registered him 2 times with the same name and address.

It appears to me as if ebay is attempted to hide the bad profiles that have been shut down to prevent sellers from seeing how many of these scams are being perpetrated. Given the fact that they will refund the PayPal payment to these scammers it appears to me to verge on complicity with the scam.

The only way you can explain the total lack of innovation in the area of cell phones is that cell phone networks are walled gardens that are extremely limited in competition. 

If you are are interested in browsing the internet whilst on the go to get information here is the minimal ATT/Cingular plan

Rate Plan Details
- Included Data 5MB
- Additional Data $0.008/KB
- Canadian Data $0.015/KB
- International Data $0.02/KB

Yes you read that right. You get 5 MB of data transfer.  That’s it. Its rediculous. It’s dumb. Only a business protected by government regulation can do this ! Such poor service at such a high price.

Google has it Right with the Spectrum Auctions.  They way the frequency band to be set up as an open system.  For the love of Christmas the FCC should do this but I’m afraid they will not.

The good thing about being difficult to convince
              Is once I am convinced
It is very hard to convince me I am wrong to feel
             Or to think what I do.
The bad thing about being difficult to convince
              Is once I am convinced
It is very hard to convince me I am wrong to care
              Even after you are gone