Author: Barbara Nicholson Bell
Published on: February 4, 2003

Several years ago, in one of my very first articles, I wrote about the dangers lurking on the Internet for collectors who were not familiar with buying and selling online. Recently I re-read that article and realized that not much has changed. Nowadays, however, the odds of being scammed have risen dramatically.

The number of Internet users has mushroomed to the point that over 50% of American households have online access, and even the most remote and poverty-stricken nations have cyber-cafes in their major cities. In fact, some of the most clever scams seem to originate in third-world countries, but they are certainly not exclusive to those locations.

"eBay account hijacked, bidders bilked in `rampant' fraud
By Paul Wenske, Knight Ridder Newspapers

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - KRT NEWSFEATURES (KRT) - For a couple of days last month someone was auctioning Sony camcorders from Kevin Pilgrim's eBay account. But the auctioneer wasn't Pilgrim, who lives in Raytown, Mo. More than two dozen online bargain hunters agreed to pay $605 apiece, in some cases wiring money to Germany. But there were no camcorders. The two-day auction was a fraud.

While bidders got ripped off, the bad guys got away - at least for now. The scammers who hacked into Pilgrim's eBay account to woo unsuspecting bidders did their dirty work before eBay could shut his account down. A frustrated Pilgrim watched the crime unfold, able to do little more than desperately e-mail warnings to bidders. Even the FBI told him that while these electronic purse snatchings were rampant, they could not afford to tie up agents' time on each one that popped up.

'We get calls like this every day, and that shows how rampant this is,' said Jeff Lanza, a spokesman for the FBI in Kansas City."

Another incident at eBay involved the "hijacking" of a legitimate auction. After the items were successfully sold and delivered to the buyer, the same items with the same product description and photograph were listed for sale again on eBay under a different user name. It was discovered that an individual - apparently from Buzau, Romania - had created a fictitious auction with the photo and description and was asking people to send money by Western Union.

While some law enforcement agencies, with eBay's assistance, have successfully found and prosecuted these criminals, many more slip through their hands. It is easy to simply change one's e-mail address and start over again with another name and ID, and it is even easier to escape the law when one operates from a foreign country.