eBay listed millions of fake auctions to artificially boost their numbers

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Posted By: Andrew S.

It looks like eBay really was hurting due to the boycott and sellers leaving eBay. Here is a thread about millions of fake listings running for 21 days that you can't even place a bid on:

http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?threadID=2000527568

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Posted By: Jim Dale

Someone says it on a message board so its true? I'm not saying its not but it looks to me like its a post on a message board, and the one auction they posted about is removed?

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Posted By: Paul Moss

Here is a post from powersellersunite.com where one person has identified 185,000 fake auction listings.


I read the rumors of eBay posting Shill Listings and took them with a grain of salt. I didnt think they could stoop so low. I was wrong.

User ID sdc_prod_434012 has 34998 items listed. No feedback. When you click on the feedback profile it shows User Id SPECTRUMSUPERSTORE member since 11 April 2007.

sdc_prod_9124_14 HAS 48391 ITEMS LISTED. 253 Feedback. When you click on the feedback profile it shows User Id THENERDS, INC member since DEC 2007

sdc_prod_9074_35 HAS 21401 ITEMS LISTED. 0 feedback. When you click on the feedback profile it shows User Id PCRUSH.COM ,member since 28 FEB 2008. And get this NOT A REGISTERED USER WITH OVER 20 THOUSAND LISTINGS? eBay is starting to cover this up.

sdc_prod_9452 HAS 24471 ITEMS LISTED. 75 FEEDBACK. When you click on the feedback profile it shows User Id eTronics, INC member since JUL 2007

sdc_prod_301013_74 HAS 27291 ITEMS LISTED. 503 FEEDBACK. When you click on the feedback profile it shows User Id THE TWISTER GROUP (EBAY DOES HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR AFTER ALL) member since OCT 2006

sdc_prod_9352_67 HAS 30782 ITEMS LISTED. FEEDBACK SCORE OF 915.
When you click on the feedback profile it shows User Id Digital Foto Club. member since MAY 2007

In summary there are over 185,000 listings for the sellers above which I could identify. One of them is not registered yet has over 20,000 auctions.

None of these can be bid on


Mystery listings are appearing on eBay that don't allow shoppers to bid or buy. The listings appear to be feeds from Shopping.com sellers. A look at the User ID sdc_prod_301013_74, for example, shows the seller has 27,076 listings - but the ones we clicked on did not have bid or buy buttons. Users found multiple User IDs with the preface "sdc" - a commonly used nickname for Shopping.com

A discussion about the listings began Friday night on eBay's Feedback board. Some posters believe it is a sign that eBay is trying to inflate its listing numbers to mask any effects of the seller boycott. Because of the dearth of data from eBay, Wall Street analysts put a lot of credence on listing numbers to gauge the company's marketplace performance. This month, everyone studied listing numbers to try and measure the impact of the seller boycott. And sellers have been prowling the site looking for any evidence of manipulation.

Update 3/1/08: eBay spokesperson Usher Lieberman responded by email on Saturday, "This was a limited test that has run its course." I appreciate the update on a weekend and, if I learn more next week, will update this post.

Interesting "spin" from the Ebay rep, a limited "test" of software. With that they can probably get away with the stunt, though I have seen shareholder lawsuits over more innocuous things than this. The high priced Wall Street analysts are looking at the listing numbers, and Ebay knew this, so I'm sure they wish their "test" didn't get spotted. Depending on how widespread the incident is, and what is said in an official response from Ebay, this could get ugly, or be a non-event.

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Posted By: Joann

Wow. I'm surprised this thread isn't getting more run, especially with the last update Paul posted.

So there are 150K+ listings on ebay that are test only, not biddable, by ebay's own description, and they just happened to run during the sellers' boycott??? Wow.

That is shady-a$$ as heck!

Joann

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Posted By: Andrew S.

eBay deleted the original thread. Here is another on the central seller board. Reportedly, the fake listings were in the millions during the boycott....not just thousands.

http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?threadID=2000527614&tstart=0&mod=1204489951151

and another news story on
Auction Bytes:

http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl?/comments/2008/3/1204379814.html

Fox News, CNN and The Wall Street Journal will be running stories about it Monday morning and the SEC/FTC has been notified also. Wouldn't be surprised to see a class action suit against them. This is basically fraud
since they're a publicly traded company. Purposely reporting false numbers has severe penalties. Our listings were buried under a pile of fake listings that ebay put there. This made it harder for people to find our listings and resulted in a drop in sales for us. They took money from us so we could list our items and then
they buried them with phony listings that competed against us. Bad-faith dealings.

Here is one of many live recorded screenshots on YouTube of the fraud. They listed millions of fake auctions with NARUd user IDs and zero feedback user Ids.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mePI-UWDGOE

Ummm....something ain't quite right on eBay. Check out this seller - has been on ebay 10 years with a feedback rating of only 558 - but he currently has 90,721 items listed! Something smells funny and it's not my sneakers.
The seller's 1-800 number belongs to an airline! Wonder how many other "sellers" have 100,000 items listed?

http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZcollect2000

Here is a zero feedbacker with 10,000 listings. None of them had any bids:


http://tinyurl.com/37gk2n

New boycott scheduled for May 1 to coincide with the new improved feedback policy. I wonder if Ebay will list a bunch of bogus auctions again?

http://seekingalpha.com/article/66733-ebay-bares-its-ugly-new-face

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Posted By: Andrew S.

deleted

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Posted By: SC

<Purposely reporting false numbers has severe penalties. >
I'm pretty sure eBay does NOT report listing numbers...it's third party services that calculate these. So I don't know if they could be in violation of anything.

The bigger question as mentioned would be if ebay's listing damaged sales potential of other items.

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Posted By: davidcycleback

I'm not speculating where/whom/why the postings came from, and I don't even hold an private opinion about that. However, companies have gotten into trouble for lying about sales numbers to shareholders, etc (Ever heard of Enron?). Inflating sales numbers this way (if it happened this way, and I'm not saying it did) could have legal ramifications, if only civil. At the least, investor knowledge of this business practice would cause the stock to take a beating on Wall Street.

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Posted By: peter ullman

A worse beating than ebay has already taken? Is that possible? As a shareholder...I hope not!!!!!