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Everybody's got something to sell, and nowadays, they're doing it online. Businesses with no online presence are shooting themselves in the foot as the brick-and-mortar sales model grows more outdated. Individuals, too, are cashing in, taking advantage of myriad auction sites to sell all kinds of things. While you can't sell infants, body parts, drugs, or souls on places like Ebay (and many have tried; Ebay says they have to remove ten souls per day from the auction lists), you can sell just about anything else.
This new marketplace is not without peril, though. Fraud is a very real part of commerce, and it's becoming an increasingly real part of e-commerce, too. Remember when CDNow got hacked around Xmas time a couple years ago? Online auctions are seeing fraud in increasing numbers, too, as people exploit holes in the security to bilk others out of their money. None of the auction sites have done a very good job at curbing this behavior, though all, of course, claim to be trying.
As you might have expected, someone is fighting back. Vigilantism doesn't stop with Batman anymore, kids; it's gone online into the sometimes seedy world of the auctions. Stepping into the shoes of Bruce Wayne is Greg Harrington, a security consultant from Houston. It's not hard to deduce that he got cheated in an online auction, so now he's got something of a watchdog group going to fight back.
This is what happened to Harrington: he purchased camera equipment for $500 from an online auction. He wired the money to Romania, and never got his goods. Read that one again. He wired the money to Romania, $500 worth in fact, for camera equipment.
Hello? Who in their right mind would wire money to a complete stranger halfway around the world? Especially a country like Romania, which is best known for the history of Vlad the Impaler, and little of note since. Anyone who does something like that is a cretin, plain and simple. Hell, just toss $500 down the nearest sewer when you take your dog for a walk. Harrington was swindled, sure, but he allowed himself to be in so naïve and blatant a fashion that he doesn't have much ground to complain.
The way his watchdog posse works is, they email bidders and auction services about auctions they think are suspicious. What grounds they base these suspicions on are unknown. In some cases, they even bid up the item, winning the auction with no intent to buy, just to save some poor, unsuspecting sucker from the potential to be defrauded.
You'll forgive me if, unlike others, I don't want to canonize Harrington and his group. Deliberately bidding up auctions when you have no intention of paying the seller is fraud, plain and simple. So in order to fight online fraud, Harrington and his cronies are committing online fraud. What a winning formula. I guess they think they're teaching people lesson by turning the tables on them.
But what if the person they're doing this to isn't committing fraud? There are an awful lot of honest, legitimate sellers on Ebay, Yahoo, and other auction sites, and it's a very real possibility they could be targeted just because the Harrington Posse think something is fishy about one of their auctions. Auction houses frown on allegations of fraud, and have been known to cancel accounts in those cases. Imagine being someone who has an attractive (and legit) online auction business, only to find out your account has been cancelled due to an accusation of fraud. There are many examples in American society that the mere accusation of criminal misdeed is enough to taint the accused's image in the eyes of the public. Never mind the relisting fees and other expenses associated with Harrington's group bidding up auctions.
While I agree with the intent of Harrington's crusade - stopping online fraud is a noble goal, after all - I must take serious exception with his methods. Fighting fraud by committing it yourself, and potentially harming legitimate sellers, isn't the way to do it. Harrington says legitimate sellers were targeted in only 5 out of 200 actions by his group, but since we don't know their standards for intervening in an auction in the first place, that number is very nebulous.
If you buy online, beware of fraud. If something sounds too good to be true, it is. No one is going to offer something rare and valuable for the price of a trinket. I know common sense is not so common, but if you're bidding in an auction online, try to use some of it.
And if you're selling, watch out for meddlesome, do-gooder crusaders on the lookout fro fraud.
12 March 2002