Originally Posted by
CliffordK
Is Ebay shutting down the accounts?
I have to wonder if the base accounts are legitimate, but someone has hacked the passwords to post the bike ads.
Or, perhaps it is a large company with several employees and several E-Bay accounts, and one employee decided to sneak one past their boss. Snag some buyers, then cancel the ads before they are noticed among the thousands of legit electronic ads.
Odd that all the links appear to be the same, so all the bikes get offered for the same BIN price no matter whether they are a $1000 bike, $2000 bike, or a $5000 bike.
Also a unique selection of bikes is showing up. Mostly vintage. I did see a birdie.
The other thing. E-Bay's own "similar ads" function is able to pick these ads out quite easily, so it would seem like the company should be able to fight them pretty easily. Of course, also scanning for those links and fake Buy-it-now photos.
Or, perhaps do it like credit card companies. Track the kids of sales an E-Bay seller is making, and those that don't fit the pattern get flagged. Just like if I suddenly purchased a half dozen $100 meals out of state on my credit card, I'd hope they'd be shut down quickly.
All good questions. The accounts these past few days have hundreds - some over a thousand - bikes and 90% are 2010 or newer. It's incredible the sheer quantity of "bait" ads they have out there!
The "Princeton Road Bicycle" and Bianchi have been two of the ones constantly offered. I haven't been saving the seller names, so I'm not 100% sure if eBay is shutting down every accounts - the seller pictured above is
bargainsmartz and I see someone pulled every single item they were auctioning, it was thousands. eBay is very responsibly removing every single auction item I've reported as fraudulent within 3-4 hours. None of the feedback on their items point to any listing where I can get more info about the seller, which makes me think they were shut down.
I remember some of the recent account names had certain words in the seller name, one with "coins" and another one "wind". Those two accounts were supposedly based out of "Hallandale" Florida, and the one I posted above was somewhere more central US, like Kentucky, Kansas or Oklahoma. Despite that being the item location, "shipped from China" according to the eBay search results, which is another red flag. The accounts had variable numbers of prior sales and almost zero sales for the past month, but a reasonable amount prior - looks almost as if they were offloading a lot of stuff to culminate a lot of feedback, then exploit that for malicious purposes.
I'll try to keep eyes on this one as I see them come up to see if eBay is taking them offline.
Edit: Actually, now I look at it, seeing how far this member goes back on eBay, it actually looks a lot like someone is targeting and hijacking someone else's accounts. There's no way a malicious actor sat on an eBay account for 10 years only to use it for a scam one day. Criminals aren't that dedicated.