An Easy Way to Avoid Fraud
I publish a web site on eBay called EzineArticles.com. I try to write unbiased articles highlighting my findings regarding auction/seller fraud. However, in my first few posts, I noticed that I was struck by how many buyer emails I was getting that said something like “I just sent an EzineArticles.com article to 100 people and this is the result.” That got me thinking… perhaps my readers were getting the same thing… and yes, it was definitely that.
Then, I calculated the avg. rating by raided rating (Hide rating) of my auction/seller products… of which there were far more ratings than I care to count. To remedy this, I removed from my sales database all auction/seller products until I could figure out how to contact the buyer. That took me about 3 days.
The story has a happy ending though. The buyer was very nice and immediately sent me a return email telling me that he would not be returning my emails any time soon. I assumed that he meant it, but when I checked his emails I got a lot more… and I couldn’t believe it!
The poor guy had bought from me twice… and lost tons of money in the process. I was so surprised that he had actually sent an email telling me he had received “another unfavorable report from eBay” and his account was being closed. For people that know me, that’s way out of character… but, you know the game.
I have since learned that most “eBay” accounts are hijacked and taken over each day. I see stolen images almost every day and individual “knockoff” cars and groups of 5-10 sellers that are simply destroying the auction system. They are hoarding merchandise and creating a Monster Ratioc Team… that could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars over and over again.
Without getting into all the spurate details, suffice to say that if you are on EBay or any other place where “the fish grows fat” you are potentially being attacked and may fall victim to a group of thieves called a team. They are highly coordinated and have teams of people that steal links, photos, products and more from each and every auction that is listed with their specific nickname.
The newest eBay term is Team auctioning. This is where a seller will have a team of people working for them and will receive weekly reports regarding the status of their auctions. So, the next time you see a seller with a Team,Tx,. they are most likely selling affiliate products that have been stolen and won’t be receiving the money they paid for.
The next report will be regarding the seller and the Team members that stole the goods. You’ll want to know who on the list of thieves is on your own? Find out who the hacker is that switched your account. This will help you track them down if you can’t find them yourself.
Switch accounts
One of the more important things that you can do is to change your password the first time that you log onto your eBay account. It doesn’t have to be anything special just a simple change of your password. Be sure to use something that is easy for you to remember but not quite memorable. You do have to change it to avoid fraud so that if it was your name on the auction you won’t fall for it.
Stay incognito
Most of us keep a blog or some kind of review site on our sites and once we are done with it we pretty much forget about it. I find it important to keep clean from then on. You can do so by keeping your account as anonymous as possible.
Clean up your account
Whenever you start your eBay account, you must first log in. This requires you to choose a username and password. For security reasons, you should choose a password that is very hard to guess as well as unique. Choose something not so obvious for username and password just to be on the safe side.
You will also have to register with eBay and this is where you will need to keep your username and password. I have been in situations where someone immediately saw the username of the person upstreaming the payment and that is exactly what they did not want me to have.
Paypal will also be a major source of funds for you to transfer money as well as receive payment for vendors. They have cracked down really hard on scammers and have turned this into one of their biggest money making sources.
As long as you are working in the internet, you will be in need of PayPal as well as hundreds of other places where you can get paid. The internet is a huge market and you will likely find hundreds of affiliate sites as well as hundreds of unique opportunities to make money online.
