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Police to be trained by eBay in bid to prevent online fraud
Mark Prigg, Technology Correspondent7 Nov 2008
AUCTION website eBay is to launch a training course for the Met to teach officers to spot online fraud.
The site plans to train 22 officers on how the site works, and what precautions are in place to protect consumers.
It will also teach them how to search profiles and analyse trading histories to spot potential fraudsters.
There have already been trials of the scheme elsewhere in Britain, with more than 2,000 officers trained.
Steve Edwards, head of law enforcement relations for eBay UK, said: "Trust is the engine of eBay, and with 15million people visiting our site each month we have a duty to make it as safe and secure as possible."
The company hopes the scheme will help improve its links with police. "We already work closely with law enforcement agencies like the police and trading standards, and so far this year we have assisted them in nearly 7,000 investigations, with the arrest or conviction of nearly 200 criminals," said Mr Edwards.
"This collaborative approach has contributed to a 24 per cent reduction in the number of people having a bad experience or being defrauded on eBay in 2008 - sending a clear signal to criminals that they won't get away with illegal activity on our site."
Reader views (2)
Well it’s been a long time since my last post so here is an update.
I went to the Birmingham police with a hand full of evidence proving the person who sold me the car was a fraudulent trader and that he had eight other eBay account that I knew about.
The police refused to investigate saying it’s a civil matter and sent me off to the trading standards who said I had a good case but they needed to verify details with eBay and this is where the fun start.
After 3 months of waiting and many emails from myself the trading standards finally turn around after this single line of enquiry and out of the blue say all the evidence I had provided was circumstantial knowing full well many of the eBay pages I pointed them too would no longer be available to the general public and that all the google links joining the various accounts would also be gone after this period of time.
As luck would have it I took copies of a number of the pages so the next response was to say that if I could not provide the trading standards with a authentic name and address for the trader then they would drop the case even when I had told them all from day one that this person was a fraudster and provided them with a number of names, addresses and eBay account.
Both the Police and trading standards wanted to play a game of pass the parcel with me and so I put a complaint in to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) and what I got back from the Police was one of them one size fits al
- Ebay Buyer, UK, 16/06/2009 12:17
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I Purchased a car using eBay and it turned out that this 2007 Car should not be on the road and has a 3 page list of faults so I started to look at the seller of this car and soon discovered he was in fact a car dealer and had been kicked off eBay several times after a couple of the members complained about him.
Since I have consumer rights I contacted eBay to ask for contact details and what I got back was half an address and a telephone number registered to an hospital. I asked eBay for more information so I could take civil actions but they did not reply. Other people contacted me and told me that this particular trader has had several accounts closed down already and they to would like to contact him.
It seems to me that eBay are only concerned with getting paid and you can bet payment for the advert of the car I brought got paid no trouble.
Since eBay won’t protect buyers I decided to write a program that list all the cars the seller has sold in the past along with technical details for each car and in some case it provides an average selling price. See http://ebaymotors.freeblogit.com/
Later I will be publishing a list of sellers on the internet who are not registers as a business and are selling several cars a month with links to cars they have sold in the past in an effort to get eBay to protect buyers and ensure they don’t hide behind the data protection act when asked to provide details and to pass on more information so that fraudsters can be tracked do
- Ebay Butyer, UK, 19/11/2008 19:09
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