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Marsha Collier, the author of eBay for Dummies, sounds like a very nice woman on the phone, but one gets the sense that she doesn't suffer fools lightly.
"When a guy buys a TV from the back of a truck, and if he takes it home and sees that the TV doesn't work, who's fault is it?" Collier said when asked to comment on the possibility of fraud occurring on the world's largest auction site. "In the real world, we'd say it was the buyer's fault for not paying attention to the signs."
Her message is simple: A small number of sellers on Internet auction sites are in it for the scam, but they're as conspicuous as the guy selling TVs from a Chevy.
Consequently, she says, there's no need for lawmakers in Washington to get involved in online auctions – a move that began to look likely on Tuesday when Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-Louisiana), the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, asked auction site CEOs to detail the rate of auction fraud at their companies.
Tauzin's letter, which was also signed by Rep. Heather Wilson (R-New Mexico), asks eBay, Yahoo and Amazon to assist "in determining the causes of online auction fraud as well as solutions to help protect consumers and boost confidence in e-commerce."
Auction fraud, according to a recent survey by the Internet Fraud Complaint Center, comes in many flavors. The biggest scam is non-delivery – after a buyer pays for an item, the seller disappears, and the item never arrives. Another problem is "shilling," which is when a seller (or someone in cahoots with the seller) bids on his own item in order to drive up its price.
The IFCC reported that auction scams such as these account for about 64 percent of all reported Internet fraud, but a spokesman for eBay maintained that a very tiny portion of its auctions turn out to be scams.
"It's less than 0.01 percent, and we've seen that rate coming down recently," said eBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove. He attributed the declining rate to increased consumer awareness of the possible hazards of auctions. Neither Amazon nor Yahoo returned calls for comment.
The IFCC, too, said that less than 1 percent of auctions resulted in fraud.
Collier, the Dummies author, said that a little consumer awareness goes a long way in the auction world. She is not affiliated with the company but she says that eBay provides "some great tools to check out a seller, and it has a very strong SafeHarbor system." SafeHarbor is eBay's mechanism for consumers to report fraud.
Before you bid on anything of some value, there are some simple things you can do to check the seller's honesty, Collier said.
"I do the obvious thing and check the feedback," she said, referring to the comments that others on eBay have posted regarding the seller in question. She also urges prospective bidders to contact sellers with their questions.
"A response from somebody who cares about the sale looks a whole lot different (than one) from someone who's trying to scam you," she says. "Bidding on eBay is not a game – every time you place a bid you better be sure who you're dealing with and what you're doing."
One way to quickly check out a seller is to run his eBay I.D. through eSafe2Bid, an eBay helper utility developed by a hobby programmer and eBay shopper named Gary Mace.
The program analyzes the bidding practices of an eBay or Yahoo auction member to determine whether you should be wary of the fellow. It can suss out shill bidding and it aggregates negative comments on one screen.
Mace said that the program cuts down the time it takes to do what every responsible auction bidder should do – check out the seller.
"It really would take several hours to do what the program does in two minutes," he said.
