Ebay Cyber Monday Cyber Crimes
“And if you sell anything to your neighbor or buy from your neighbor, you shall not wrong one another.” – Leviticus 25:14 (AMP)
Ebay is running an insane Cyber Monday deal. They are randomly putting different items out each day for $1 Buy It Now and free shipping. Today’s items are 50 Nintendo Wii Systems, 40 Juicy Couture Day Dreamers bags, and 1 2009 C6 Corvette. A Wii for $1 is nice. A Corvette would be even better.
Bring your bot/scripts though. You will otherwise have a pretty slim chance of finding a deal. Many of the auctions are being sold with 0 page views and I’ve seen one that sold in 4 seconds from the time of listing. Not bad considering you have to load 1 page to see the auction listing, 1 page to see the auction page, and another page to confirm your bid. Even with no latency, you’d still be hard pressed to get 3 page loads with sensible clicks in 4 seconds.
If you’re feeling lucky, go to their DoorBusters page. There are still 7 more days worth of deals left.
The method they are listing their special deals is a little hectic. It’s basically the first person who can buy the item gets it, and you have to be lightning fast to win. This unfortunately has led to scammers running bogus auctions preying on people’s sense of urgency.
The most successful scammer of the day is a user named “Charles Fairchild” of Waynesville, Mo. Considering Waynesville is a town of 3500 people, it is probably the same Charles Fairchild as this guy on myspace (or that guy’s son Chuckie Jr). Anyways, long story short he listed a phony auction to catch people who were trying to jump these doorbuster deals. Two minutes and 4996 transactions later, his auction was stopped. I’m guessing many people paid immediately via paypal (multiple mention doing so in their feedback for him). It’s only a buck, but they are more upset about the heartbreak of thinking they won something.
Here is a list of successful bidders, notice how tiny the vertical scroll bar is… To get a count of bidders I had to copy and paste the list to Excel and let it count for me. Again, 4996 was the total. According to my caluclations that is about $440 worth of ebay fees (which ebay claims he may have to pay for listing a phony auctions).
Only 91 people left negative feedback. He had a +79 before the feedback started rolling in. A few people have accidently left positive feedbacks for him so at the time of typing this up he has a +2. Ebay removed the auction, which makes it so people can no longer leave feedback.
This is what his profile looked like less than 1 hour after collecting paypal pennies.
