Where do I start? I recently tried to purchase a piece of epectrical testing equipment for approx £600 on ebay, everything looked legit, over 200 positive 100% feedback, a powerseller etc, positive feedback for the same item we were trying to buy, the guy selling the item gave his name and address in Belfast and a Barclays bank account to deposit the money in (stupid I know outside paypal etc.). I along with 30+ others deposited money into this account and guess what? no tester turns up and the guy is not respnding to emails.
We created a forum and contacted ebay. After a little digging we found a telphone number on a previous sale on this ebay user ID and conacted the owner, from manchester, he advised us that the account had been stolen from him in Spetember, he hadnt used the account in over a month (to buy and sell video games) he first knew about it when someone phoned him and asked if he was selling electrical testers from Belfast, this alerted him, he couldnt log onto the account, and he reported the stolen account to ebay via another account he was using. Ebay replied the same day with an automated repsonse that they would look into it and the owner assumed that it was being sorted, but the acount remained active and we all fell for it. The address he gave was in belfast but the sort code of the bank is for a branch in London.
Now we have all reported the matter to ebay who simply say they can not give any information but advise us to go to the police, barclays bank say they will not act until the police advise them to. Our local police wont react because they say the crime was commited in Belfast, the Belfast police say the guys name doesnt tally with the address given so they have come to a dead end.
But it doesnt end there, we have spent hours trawling through ebay data and we have found the same ID's popping up giving positive feedback for expensive test equipment, ID's that show no history of selling electronic equipment and then all of a sudden they have 20 of these things to sell in their back yard, sucking people in and then a string of negative feedback from people who have been stung. We estimate at the very least this outfit has pulled in over £40K+
We have tried to highlight this outfit to ebay who do not seem interested at all but just give us automated responses about user privacy. Our local police have told several of us to take this to the press to try to get it out in the open.
My question is this, given the fact that this is a big fraud operation and the original owner reported the account theft to ebay before any sales took place, would we as a group have any chance of prosecuting ebay for negligence as they didnt close the account down before it was too late?
Any help or advice will be appreciated
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