NOS Grafton Re-entry levers - £280 and rising

[heartbreaker]

Is it Ryan Giggs

 

[Rod_Saetan]

So it was an evil scam, punishing capitalist Westerners, that has recently stopped?

It was Bin Laden.

 

[heartbreaker]

Reports just out... Bin Laden was found with 500 euros,
2 mobile phones and a stash of Nos purple Graftons in his underpants.

Damn those pesky Taliban!

 

[Fudd]

Supremate, You obviously work in law and have admirably strong views on the rights of the individual etc, but to compare this act of decit and what amounts to thievery imo, with that of an honest buyer who wants to enqure if the seller has a bin price in mind is laughable

You keep making reference to letting the law sort it out but lets not forget what we are talking about here - a seller who lost maybe £50-100 on some brake levers. Is it worth getting the lawyers involved? I've never had the pleasure of a dispute with Ebay/Paypal but I've heard the fact their offices are registered in Luxembourg means its a right pain in the ass if you are a victim of a scam and from the UK.

If the scammer gets outed he's hardly likely to lose much, if anything at all. Its not as if the newspapers are going to pick up on it and he'll have vigilantes on his door.
I say name and shame and then the good people who are reading this will have one extra little extra nugget of information to prevent themselves from becoming a victim

Then kill him to death.
With napalm.

:twisted: :twisted: :twisted:

 

[GoldenEraMTB]

Thanks for your reply goldenera, I'm glad you jumped into the discussion again. First of all: it should be clear by my postings that there's nothing personal regarding you, and certainly I'm not coming after you. So I hope you understand my postings as a purely factual discussion as they were ment, no way personal. Ok?

Now back to the issue: You told us more about the background of your findings, thanks for that. And you did so while still keeping the person private, using only his/her selfchosen public ebay-identity, which is the relevant one in that matter. This ebay-identity has been outed and reported to ebay as I have read on the first pages. No harm done here, that's the way to go. Now ebay and it's employees know his real name, know the name of the sellers, can identify the other 2 and can act accordingly, they also have to reveal that information to any lawyer contacting them in that matter.

You said you are unsure about whether you should publicly reveal the name or not. Think about why you are hesitating, the cause is most likely what I am talking about. Your motivation for making that persons identity public here on retrobike surely is to give help to the community, which should be fine of course and I must be crazy to opponent this. The problem is, goldenera, you are not involved, not entitled, and you are still acting on vage indications:

...who might have had negative interactions with odessitka42, and were unable to get info?

Why I'm emphasizing "might" should be clear. Lets think about the other part, the members that might be unable to get info otherwise? Well, it should be clear from the scheme, that if you have the name of one of them you get the names of all of them via a lawyer and ebay. Now every seller that has been victim of this scheme has the name of one of the three, which is exactly you want to provide him with. So frankly, if there is any retrobike member, that was victim of such a scheme, there is absolutely no need for what you consider nessessary, since it is already known to him. If you compare your knowledge to the one ebay employees already must have on that matter, it is negligible. So every victim of the scam gets much more information from ebay than from you.
BUT: What, if there is no retrobike member that was victim of the scheme? Your action would nothing but harm a persons private sphere here without having helped anyone. And again: everyone involved acted as ebay member while being involved in the scheme, and not as retrobike member. This distinction is very important in regard to possible consequences for the individual, since those have to be related to the action.

the members there were very active when it came to outing scammers, even to the point of gathering a caravan to pay the offending member a visit

I'm sorry to hear that. I thought I've mentioned selfjustice...


Well, there is something you've said regarding a possible motivation for outing, which I consider quite important:

Chances are that if the person had success with his scam, and had his ebay name closed down, or closed it down himself, he would most likely try it again, under a new name.

May be, but as a constitutional citizen you can not act on that assumption. Even if you were guilty in the past you are unguilty by default in the future. This is fundamental. It is the presumption of innocence I was mentioning before. And acting in foresight of a possible crime is nothing but negating this presumption of innocence and the way to general suspicion.

Look, I'm all with you that those scams never should happen, and that you have to be aware of others doing harm to you or your friends, let alone helping each other out. But as well, you have to be aware of yourself doing harm to others, this is most likely why you hesitate. And of course it would be of great personal extent (word?), if the guy stepped forward to say I apologize to anyone, get back to me to get things sorted. I think he probably would gain much from it in the community than he would loose. But this must be his choice. By your behaviour you seemed to not letting him that choice, indicating a punishment in form of violation of his private sphere which you have no the right to do so. There is a difference between punishing someone for having done something, and to teach him not to do so. Teaching him still respects his personal rights, while punishing doesn't. We are talking of a retrobike member here, and I pretty much think that we teach him in this thread not to do so any more.

You make more assumptions that I do. The emails I received are clear, and the connections to the current ebay name are obvious. I'm not going on a hunch here; I have proof.
One of your assumptions, on ebay having more information than I have regarding this matter, is incorrect. Ebay/Paypal, despite what you might thing, is not much good at bringing fraudulent members to justice. Also, bringing legal action against a seller/buyer is also not an easy proposition. I guarantee you that ebay does not have his retrobike name. Nor, do they have the connection between his closed name and current name, as they were co-existent, and probably very separate.
Another one of your assumptions regarding my conflict of completely outing the person, was wrong and unnecessary, as I stated, specifically, my reasons. One of them being that it seems like this was all in the past, and pending any new findings, perhaps the person has seen the error of his ways, and turned away from such practices. or not. Either way, I made my reasons clear; no assumptions or speculation needed.

That said, I'm also not convinced the retrobike name/account is a unique person. It might be a troll account as it has some of the tell tale signs of such account. If so, then who is the true owner/user (or owners/users) of this RB name? The connection I've made is not in question, but how far it goes, and who all is associated remains unknown. I'm not willing to show my hand, till maybe I know an answer to this other part. So long as my info isn't helping anyone right a wrong, currently, I'll keep it to myself.

No worries, my information isn't going anywhere. Scooby-dooby-doo!

 

[BoyBurning]

Presumably, if the seller had been more active in researching the items they were selling, they would have put a reserve price on the auction.

By doing that the seller could not have been scammed in this way.

We would not have five pages on the rights of the individual, and a thread which certain members seem solely to be using as a platform.

In the end, if the seller hadn't been so lazy the situation would not have arisen.

It is the scammer's prerogative to take advantage of such sellers.

That is the reason why all auctions have the option to set up a reserve.

LloydsTSB have been asking for my account passwords so that their Nigerian head office can process the bonds that have recently matured in my name.

I won't be replying to the email because I am protecting myself and have done my own research.

People shouldn't expect free dinners.

BB

 

[supremate]

Fudd, thanks for your post and for pointing to something, which I now see might also have been a misunderstanding in the conversation before with mfh126:

...but to compare this act of decit and what amounts to thievery imo, with that of an honest buyer who wants to enqure if the seller has a bin price in mind is laughable

When you compare, you see the differences as well as the commons. You pointed out the differences and I totally agree with you. But it gets blurry when the buyer becomes someone who tries to make a "steal", get it?
To make it absolutely clear: there is no problem in the enquiry of a BIN price and open and fair negotiations with the seller, whatever price he agrees to at the end, be it a good one or a bad. The point is: open, like in open and above board, which I guess you and mfh126 assumed by nature. This means, you reveal your advanced knowledge about the items value to your partner, if he doesn't know it, since the items value is relevant. So when I point to commons of this scam here (not differences) to a BIN offer, I am speaking of a special kind of BIN offer, the low-ball BIN. This is an attempt to get personal gain by intentionally hiding relevant information from a potentially uneducated seller, by suggesting (pretending) the low-ball being a fair/real value (the pretention is wrong), and (mostly looking as dull as possible) to suggest you are acting just like another honest buyer that simply asks for a BIN. The BIN iself and asking for it is not the point. The point is the low-ball, which can be seen as attempt to scam the seller. FYI: intentionally hiding or pretending wrong relevant information from your contract partner is scam.
Of course this is the reason for educated sellers to include "Please don't low-ball me", because they have been educated before of a possible "steal" (I use it again) behind such an attempt. As I said before, it is a slippery slope. In case of the current scheme an educated seller identifies the attempt by the shill bidding scheme, just like the educated seller identifies the low-ball scheme by the value suggested and perhaps the early time the offer appears. So the educated seller will ignore the auctions result as he does with the low-ball, he just ignores attempts to being scammed. He can report it to ebay, or include a phrase and so on.
Please keep in mind, that for the comparison I make the actual way how the scammer does it, is not relevant. Here I'm adressing the point, that the current scheme appears to be much more forceful than the low-ball. It is the nature of the attempt that counts for being an attempt to scam, which is related to the intention of the scammer. Well, I hope I have made this point more clear now than before...


I very welcome your mentioning of sorting out the actual situation legally (or of course within the circle of involved), and the problems you see on that side. Here I try to adress your comments, goldenera, regarding ebay's "helpfulness", too:

You keep making reference to letting the law sort it out but lets not forget what we are talking about here - a seller who lost maybe £50-100 on some brake levers. Is it worth getting the lawyers involved? I've never had the pleasure of a dispute with Ebay/Paypal but I've heard the fact their offices are registered in Luxembourg means its a right pain in the ass if you are a victim of a scam and from the UK.

First of all: nobody says, it is always easy to do the right thing. But if you want to behave better than the one you are pointing to, you have to.

So what should you do in practice? First: do it yourself right. Second: Remember, that all costs of the lawyers and the procedure have to be taken over by the scammer. While a one-time 50-100$ loss may not be enough to get through to a decision, it easily sums up together with the other victims of the scheme, that are easily reached through ebay by the lawyer. Btw. once this happened to, say, a "NOS purple Grafton" scammer, he has been teached. Legally, and having done all right. But this can only happen if the victim takes the right action. Please note that our jurisdiction is an achievement of our society, not a penalty to the victim (even if it sometimes looks different ;-)
Third: Ebay has to act according law, too. Although ebay europe is located in Luxembourg which determines most likely the court of jurisdiction, it is within EU as is the UK (EU law is above national law). Btw. the definition of scam is not any different in Luxembourg, they are civilized there, too. Btw. acting within EU is no problem to any european lawyer.
Fourth: If you are lazy and don't go the legal way, it does not give you the right to act against law and to practice selfjustice. In this case learn your lesson, being victim or not, and deal with the scam, not the scammer accordingly. As do the sellers with included notes btw.

 

[tintin40]

This thread was started in Sept 2010 :shock: I bet it's lasted longer than the levers

 

[sinnerman]

This thread was started in Sept 2010 :shock: I bet it's lasted longer than the levers

pmsl...............

 

[BoyBurning]

This thread was started in Sept 2010 :shock: I bet it's lasted longer than the levers

Nice one Tone...!