[SwellJoe]

They're doing a terrible job of preventing scams. Right now there are hundreds of listings for GPUs at too-good-to-be-true prices from sellers with 0 feedback or, worse, from old accounts with positive feedback that have obviously been taken over by scammers (all the feedback is from years ago and about unrelated products). Trust is what eBay brings to the table, when they cede that to scammers, they stop being useful...I can get scammed on TikTok any time I want.

[xp84]

Is this really a big problem for buyers now? Asking genuinely, not rhetorically. In my experience with eBay (my account is 25 years old), the one thing you could count on is that buyers who receive nothing, or get a box of bricks, or broken items or whatever, basically 100% of the time, will get refunded - if necessary, by eBay itself. (This has been frustrating of course for honest sellers who get scammed by buyers.)

So, if they have a ton of scammers now, I would think customers are not being that impacted, and I would have also thought that eBay wouldn’t have too hard a time getting the sellers to pay the refunds, since they tend to withhold the funds from sellers until a little while after the delivery is confirmed.

[SwellJoe]

It makes it feel sketchy. I don't know what the state of buyer protection is. I've read that sellers sometimes list in other countries to get around the PayPal buyer protections or otherwise get paid via some unprotected method.

I can't believe all those hundreds of thousands of listings would continue to exist if there weren't some kind of pay off. Somebody's got to be making money somehow, as it's been happening for ages.

Also, it makes searching difficult. Can't really sort by price anymore, because the lowest prices are almost entirely scams.

It's just a much less pleasant platform when half the listing are fake. This is most extreme on GPUs and RAM, of course, since that's where the feeding frenzy is happening, but it's true of many categories with expensive goods.

[Scoundreller]

> I've read that sellers sometimes list in other countries to get around the PayPal buyer protections

The buyer protections don’t really vary much, but it’s true in some countries they get more protections but it’s more regarding to buyer’s remorse rather than Items Not As Described.

> or otherwise get paid via some unprotected method

At least in North America (and maybe everywhere else), you’ve been required to pay via eBay for all transactions for the last decade or more. No more money orders, bank transfers, cheques or wire transfers or cash. And you can’t easily contact sellers/buyers directly anymore, it’s all through the platform and they block a lot of suspect messages/keywords.

[SwellJoe]

I don't know, man, I just know there's a lot of fake listings on eBay. I don't know what they're getting out of it, but I assume they're not just doing it for fun.

[Scoundreller]

It’s possible the sellers gets their cash out, the customer gets their money back from eBay and eBay is left holding the bag.

[croes]

Show me any platform that successfully prevented scam.

[SwellJoe]

eBay ten years ago. (At least, much more effectively than now, where a large percentage of listings in some categories are scams.)

[croes]

Just because they got worse doesn’t mean they were good.

The reason why it’s worse now is that automation of the scammers got better, it was more of a manual job back then.