12-09-2013, 03:30 PM
hal wrote:
[quote=Filliam H. Muffman]
As I noted in the X-bone (Xbox One) thread, people were selling pictures (and empty boxes) of the previous generation of game consoles. When a scam has been going on for at least 8 years I don't see them going out of the way to protect users (both buyers and sellers). Additional note: he didn't get a refund until after the paper ran the story.
As much as I hate agreeing with Black - he's right. That transaction is a slam dunk, 100% certainty to get money back from ebay. Even though the guy was dumber than a brick. You are assuming that he only got a refund because of publicity - that is not true.
Please highlight what you see as the quote where you think I even remotely implied that was the case.
You are assuming that ebay only wants a cut of every transaction and they don't care if people get ripped off. Think about it for a moment... even a monolith like ebay can come crashing down with the right circumstances. They want people to feel safe on ebay and work pretty damned hard to make it so. It is in their best interest to police the site as much as is humanly possible.
I guess I should have posted the extended version that I decided to delete. I believe ebay runs hundreds (thousands?) of calculations on an hourly basis to monitor how much fraud is impacting their income and reputation. Then they throw a microscopic fraction of their income at the problem until the equations balance out again.
If the X-bone picture auction was so obviously a fraud, why was it allowed to complete? Craigslist (which ebay partly owns) frequently pulls fraud posts so fast that most of the time I never see the linked 'can you believe this CL?' post unless I click on them within few minutes.