Hello,
I am writing in regard to the online auction site ebay. I am a frequent customer and am overall quite pleased.
However,there does seem to be a problem in one area. I purchase depression glass for my mother. Genuine depression glass can be very expensive and hard to come by. My mother loves it and as she is on a fixed income, I wanted to do something special for her and get her some nice pieces.
Unfortunately, I came across some very dishonest sellers. I purchased some items and had a dealer check them. They were reproductions of the originals. In effect worthless. I contacted the seller and told her: she did not deny this. At that time she was selling the exact same item and I kindly informed her that I was aware of the item being posted. I monitored the item to see if she would do the right thing and remove it. She did not. She sold it to someone else. In her description of the item she clearly and falsely states that it is depression era glass. I have downloaded all her items as evidence.
I also checked her records, she has 33 instances of complaints of selling repros in the last year. And that is under one user name. She has several as she changes her ID periodically so purchasers do not catch on.
I did not lose a large amount of money, but that is not the point. Based on her history, she has made over $1,000,000 in the last year scamming consumers under just one of these user ID's.
Ebay is no help. It's policies are skewed toward the sellers as they pay fees to ebay for listing their items. Ebay makes nothing off the buyer. Ebay's policy is for buyers and sellers to work it out among themselves and if that doesn't work to use another service you have to pay for to get resolution. Often this would cost more than the amount you paid for the item. This is true in my case. As sellers know this policy, there is little incentive for dishonest sellers to resolve issues. They can just change their ID number in order to be harder to locate.
Law inforcement is of little help because this is interstate commerce and the cost of hiring an attorney is often higher than the item price.
Again, I want to stress that the money wasted is not my main issue. The issue is that the policies of ebay allow consumers to be ripped off with no protection.
I realize you are a busy man and that these are difficult times. But could you please address this issue in Congress? Through research conducted I have found that this is a very common problem. People are having a tough enough time these days and this could, it seems to me be easily mended.