eBay Fraud Scams exposed

In hindsight of recent eBay strike that took place from 2/18 to 2/25 there has been a lot of buzz amongst eBayers that eBay is using dirty tactics to pad their listing numbers in order to minimize impact of the strike on it’s listing numbers. Today the Blogs and eBay Finance forums and eBay Seller forums are buzzing with examples of mysterious listings of items on which you cannot bid or which you cannot buy. These number in tens of thousands on seller accounts that were located today. We took some screenshots for the record.

eBay seller stc_prod_434012 auction snapshot

eBay seller sdc_prod_301013 auctions count snapshot

one of the items listed by seller sdc_prod_301013

Transaction Blocked screen if you try to bid on any items listed by sdc_prod_301013

Lot of these “seller” accounts have a prefix sdc_ which is an abbreviation for ShopingDotCom, an eBay property.

One poster on eBay Seller Forum took time to track some of them down and offered this summary:

Here is a list of Ids we found last night and the ebay express Id they are connected to.

sdc_prod_434012 = SpectrumSuperStore
sdc_prod_9021_2 = Buy.com (who is NARU!)
sdc_prod_9124_14 = TheNerds, Inc.
sdc_prod_9452 = eTronics, Inc.
sdc_prod_409455_97 = Sababa Shopping
sdc_prod_9090 = CompSource Inc.
sdc_prod_310426 = ANTOnline (who is NARU!)
sdc_prod_9074_35 = pcRUSH.com (who is NARU!)
sdc_prod_9352_67 = Digital Foto Club
sdc_prod_301013_74 = The Twister Group
sdc_prod_305839_99 = BargainBasementBatterie

Some still have auctions running. At last count it was a total of 280,000 auction listings that could not be bidded on. All had “sdc_prod” in the seller ID

I notice a couple more post here since I took my nap. so the total grows.
Most of the auctions had dutch auctions so the actual Total # of auctions is in the millions.

Another user said:

Looks like they are removing the listings, however they are being replaced just as quickly with new ones… try this: Go to the categories page… pick a category, say consumer electronics, then pick a sub category. Sort by “Time ending soonest” and scroll to the bottom of the page. It will say “Page 1 of 400″ or whatever. Go to the last page by typing the page number in the box in the lower right corner of the page. This is where they are hiding them. Because the have no end time, the always stay at the back of the real listings and never move forward. They are in just about every category I checked. And there are who knows how many of these SDC seller IDs, hundreds, even thousands, all with thousands of listings. There could be millions of these listings all included in the auction counts. If Wall Street uses these counts to rate ebay, then this might be interesting to the SEC or the FTC.

More interesting info on this Blog take a look at the transcript with the eBay Live Chat rep there.

It this is just a glitch and some programmer promoted bad code to production environment, so be it (bad for eBay at any rate, one would think that a company with 5 Billion Dollars in cash could afford better quality of personnel and a test server paired with quality control… ).

If this is a glitch and not some sort of intentional money business with auction counts, why would eBay censorship delete posts about this issue on it’s own forums? You can see posts being deleted in real time in this video on YouTube.

Update: 3/4/2008 AuctionBytes reported that eBay’s Usher Lieberman during the IMA conference on Monday said he had made a mistake when he called the Shopping.com listings a test on Saturday morning. He was trying to track it down and after talking to a few people, felt comfortable saying it was a test, and subsequently found out the listings had appeared accidentally. Usher said it was his fault for initially getting it wrong. AuctionBytes asked Usher if he could tell them more, and he could not. “Lots of things are on the table,” he said