Quote:
Originally Posted by carlsonjok
As you say, it isn't all that hard to find one suspicious transaction. What someone is not seeing here is what happens when you start to pull on that string. Maybe nothing. But, maybe the whole sweater comes unraveled.
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I don't see how this entire sweater unraveling could possibly happen though simply from "pulling a few threads". Moreover, I would argue that pulling out a few threads not only fails to unravel the sweater but those threads will just be replaced by more threads the following day when 'bannedBidder123' comes back as 'bannedBidder1234'.
Let's just pretend for a moment that PWCC (or Probstein or whoever) hires an internal BODA-like team of researchers to hunt down these bad actors full-time. And let's just pretend for a moment that the labor is entirely free so that they don't have to raise their prices and can still compete in this market. Perhaps they can hire a crew of college interns whose lifelong dream is to save the hobby. Let's say they succeed in compiling a list of all the eBay usernames who certainly, or at least very likely, shill bid on their consignments (or the consignments of others and they were just trying to pump cards with no intention to pay if they win). So now they have this master list of 100,000+ eBay IDs. What next? They've already added as many of these people as they can to their blocked bidders list (5,000) and they already ban them internally from consigning with them again in the future. What next? Even if they succeed, those same people just consign with the next company and do it again. And even if they get reported enough to where eBay bans that account, 'iShillCards2' just pops up again as 'iShillCards3'. The juice here isn't even worth the squeeze when the squeeze is free. But, of course, in reality it's not free. It would be extremely expensive to hire a team to do this. And for what? The end result is the same unless eBay itself decides to take drastic measures to address this problem at the ground level. They need structural changes in place to combat this and they need to care about the problem first in order for it to go away. To place these expectations & responsibilities on the shoulders of the sellers is a prime example of missing the forest for the trees.