Man Arrested In Huge eBay Fraud

from the scammed...-with-the-help-of-eBay dept

There are so many stories about fraud on eBay these days, that it's often not worth reading the details. However, the latest one has some interesting twists. First, it looks like it was one of the biggest fraud's done on eBay, scamming buyers out of over a million dollars in just a few weeks. The scam followed the path of the most basic eBay scam: build up good rankings for a few months selling all sorts of stuff completely legitimately, and then flood eBay with high priced items that you don't have. In this case, the company "Liquidation Universe" built up 750 positive reviews before selling a ton of laptops that didn't actually exist. However, the real twist in this case is that Liquidation Universe had been "certified" by a new eBay program called "SquareTrade" run by a third party company. SquareTrade "verifies" the seller's identity and gives them a special "SquareTrade" logo they can place on their auctions. The logo specifically reads: "$1,000 Protection" and indicates that they have done something to make sure you haven't gotten scammed. The problem is that the $1,000 "protection" is not per purchase, but per seller. So, in this case, where Liquidation Universe scammed over a million dollars, all those victims only have $1,000 total to split up. Of course, that's not clear at all from the SquareTrade logo, so it sounds like this "verified seller" program might not last very long.