I came across a post today on ebay forums in regard to Ebay Seller receiving negative feedback from buyer, but it turned out that the buyer was hired by another sellers (competitors) to ruin the reputation of another seller. The sad thing about this is that Ebay isn’t taking any action to prevent this from happening to the sellers. I understand it could be hard not easy, but Ebay need to figure this out as a company with many intelligent folks to work on logics to prevent this from happening. At this point, it’s still happening and will continue to go on until legitimate seller got tired and quit or seller will battle each other to ruin each other reputation.

Here’s a good example I found posted on ebay forums. The Ebay buyer name “michamicm7noh” off course it’s fake, you can obviously tell by the name, who would want to get such ebay name right? well scammer does. Also look at the ebay profile of this user “michamicm7noh” http://www.ebay.com/usr/michamicm7noh new user and also only have 2 positive review and if you clicked on Feedback left for other, you will see that this buyer gave strange feedback to sellers, both negative. http://feedback.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewFeedback2&userid=michamicm7noh&ftab=FeedbackLeftForOthers

This ebay account “michamicm7noh” recently gave a negative feedback to one of the seller in regard to a iphone 5 6 headset, this is a very popular device being sold on ebay, although it’s probably from China cheap made, so it’s cheap made, and cheap sell, and chances are it will work, some may not, but the majority should. Basically it’s the same headset being sold in store as well, not just on ebay.  The seller appear to be listing its product as legitimate and as truthful as possible, such as unbranded/generic cheap china made, and so on. So people should understand what they’re buying. The seller for this item appears to have the cheapest price on ebay for the item. As a result, purchases were from this seller sold more than others, and so other competitors start to play dirty game.

The dirty game began. There are plenty of forums out there such as blackhat world, thebotnet and so on, will hire people with ebay account to perform a purchase and give negative feedback after the purchase to ruin the seller’s reputation. Believe me, there are a lot of ebay user would be willing to this by getting paid even $5 $10 $50 plus the cost of the products to give negative feedback to the seller, to ruin Ebay seller business, sad but true. On top of that, some ebay user are fake, meaning the account was created by stolen identity which being sold all over the internet, created many ebay account and start to perform this task to buy and give negative feedback to the sellers.

Hackers for hire, Scammer for hire, whatever you want to call it. For this particular case, the buyer probably never received the item, it was shipped to some person with their identity including their credit card got stolen and use to purchase this item, or real credit card purchase to give negative feedback and get reimbursement from a competitive sellers whom hired them to do this to hurt the other seller. The seller whom got the negative feedback can contact ebay to investigate but most likely ebay will not take action, because most of the time Ebay side with the buyer, sad but true that Ebay most of the time side with the buyer.

Bad ebayer website posted this information about this user as example fraud scam, you can find more detail on bad ebayer website:

Buyer: Michael Sterling
Buyer’s User ID: michamicm7noh
Michael Sterling
——————-
Mesa, AZ 85202
United States

This buyer does not have paypal account. So maybe that’s the thing, ensure you only accept paypal purchase paid, just help a little.

The seller in this case now have to live with the negative fake feedback, ebay isn’t taking action to fix. The seller also reported that all of a sudden more similar buyer started to buy stuff, seller doesn’t know what to do. Apparently seller selling same items being sold by many others, but at a much lower price, as result competitor will find ways to ruin the seller reputation by getting as much negative feedback as possible, the only way is create fake fraud ebay account or by hiring people ebay account to do this.