Scammers are using bots on Ebay to create identities with huge positive feedback ratings when they have never sold anything at all, according to NewsFactor Magazine.
Buyers instinctively consider positive feedback ratings on ebay, Amazon and other services to be credible measures of seller reliability.
Thieves create accounts with seemingly huge positive feed back and then sell high ticket items with no intention of making delivery, vanishing before authorities can track them down (they hope).
Note: ebay’s system has not been breached. The scammers resort to 1 cent transactions that allow them to post false “feedback”.
The bogus accounts typically sell virtual items such as wallpapers and e-books through a “buy it now” auction for 1 cent and no shipping costs. Those items are then bought by another fraudulent eBay account, all in an automated fashion.
“Most [of the seller's] user names are made of six to eight random letters and bear around 15 evaluations. Having a look at these profiles reveal that they’ve bought roughly the same items — all for 1 cent,” Fortinet noted on its Web site.
Further indicating a level of automation, each buyer is leaving identical comments for each transaction.
“With that 1 cent rate, building 100 accounts with 15 positive feedbacks each cost $15. And 100 accounts are a reasonably solid base to set up a good deal of bogus auctions.”
The auctioning Web site is a popular target for online scam artists.
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