eBay vigilantes

Five months ago, Klaus Priebe, a soft-spoken building contractor who said he was sick and tired of fraud on eBay, decided it was time to catch the cheaters at their game.

In one recent auction, he bid as much as $2.5 million on a telescope worth no more than $2,000. He knew he would not have to pay for the telescope because he was sure that it did not exist. . . Mr. Priebe said his wild bid was an attempt to protect innocent bidders from falling into the trap he had spotted.

I've done much the same on other auction sites. And I could be certain that the listing was a fraud, since the "seller" had taken photos from my own website along with verbatim catalog descriptions.

But in eBay's view Mr. Priebe and his vigilante brethren are pariahs. Rather than embrace these virtual posses, eBay discourages them, occasionally going so far as to suspend the vigilantes' accounts.

"We love it that people want to help, but there's a right way to do it and a way that isn't constructive or in the interest of a good community marketplace," said Rob Chesnut, eBay's vice president for rules, trust and safety, who added that eBay was doing everything it could to make it safe to buy and sell on its Web site.

From the New York Times, which takes a rather sympathetic views of the "vigilantes" (one man's vigilante is another's Good Samaritan, after all).

From personal experience, I find it hard to believe eBay is really doing all it could to target fraudsters. At the very least, they ought to make it easier to report suspect items -- as is, one has to navigate a long sequence of screens to find the proper form, which is enough to discourage most casual do-gooders.

FURTHER THOUGHTS: For obvious reasons, eBay wouldn't want self-appointed enforcers interfering with suspect auctions (warning bidders, placing absurdly high bids, etc), but why couldn't they be brought on board as a sort of neighborhood watch? They could be made to register, and in return eBay would give them a direct line to report bad listings. And it wouldn't take long to determine which members of the watch were the most reliable, enabling eBay security to know which leads to follow first (and which could be safely ignored, since there will inevitably be some whose motives will be less than pure).

Posted by David on March 22, 2004 10:39 PM