You'd think that the high-rollers at Ebay would have settled this little embaressment ages ago. But no, they have to try to force Harry Potter to eat his own wand.

I've been overall satisfied (and no doubt lucky) with ebay and my dealings with them. My account has never been hijacked, and I've never had more than a minor dispute in hundreds of transactions. But the thought of having to contact them to resolve ANYTHING makes me cringe. Even in my attempts to contact them over minor tribulations & when reporting fraudulent auctions, they treat you like a machine, and good luck getting anything but a general form letter in response. While I understand that there's plenty of scammers, morons, and generally disgruntled people out there that abuse the system, perhaps customers with many transactions and great feedback should be rewarded with a ticket to a higher level of customer service. "The customer is always expendable" seems to be their motto...

Not unsurprised , as the wheels of justice in India , operate to their own perverted logic and grind exceedingly slowly , for even now much of Union Carbide's Bohpal's settlement has yet to be passed onto the surviving victims , and the ex chairperson of Union Carbide who deliberately scammed and levered the US State Department , into giving him a free get out of jail card for life card for the multiple involuntary manslaughter charges and deliberate breaches of assorted health and safety regulations left over from past colonial times (it's not called Foggy Bottom , for nothing , and whilst he resides in America , to this day State still refuses to extradite him to face all charges!) .

Or how soon we forget , the artfully evasive Indian resident by the name of Harshad Mehta's along with his brothers financial pyramid round robin disaster of the early nineties which in turn cost both the Indian State and Government Bank's directly involved in the scam a very large slice of their depositors invested savings in this unregistered speculation. In response the Indian Government Officials took local bribes , then fined the Foreign Owned banks which were indirectly involved in the scam , let off all the local Indian born resident embezzlers involved in the scam! , and then used the fine from the Foreign banks which had been held in escrow since 1992 to cover the bulk of the internally embezzled Indian Bank funds!

So why indeed , should the US owned "Ebay" believe itself to be above the law and seek a speedy end to the past owners fraud(they should have put in escrow the bulk 90% of the payment to the previous owner pending outcome of any legal restitution due under Indian Law!)

Sadly , those that fail to heed the lessons in history about India and it's convoluted financial mismanagement at all levels of Government, do repeat the same mistakes!

Remind me, how much did Ms Rowling earn in royalties last year? Do her representatives on Earth really need to get so excited about squeezing a few dollars more from some of the poor (OK and eBay as well).

Three or four years ago I used to use eBay quite a lot. It was an environment that was honourable and there were lots of bargains. I recently decided to look at eBay to buy a Web cam. I was shocked at some of the negative feedback given but my biggest moan was the number of companies listing items as 'buy it now' for little more than 99p and then charging £10 first class post and packing, from English addresses. This is a clear avoidance of eBay fees and I reported several such listings. Unfortunately eBay do not provide any feed back to me as to whether my complaints were justified. Should I bother continuing to report this flagrant cheating?

It's eBay Jim, but not as we knew it.

.... so all the organisations including the NHS that are prepared to offshore all their database handling, records, financial transactions etc. have considered the implications. After all it only takes a very small number of people involved to flog a lot of ID information

Aren't they? I mean, first the stupid yanks rename the book to "Sorcerer's Stone", even though there's a historical reason why it's called the Philosopher's Stone (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Flamel), but then they go and try to rip off our books (our being the British Empire... :p). It's very disrespectful, yet quite typical of Ebay, who as many others before me have said, have a very shit idea of what customer value means.

Thumbs down for Ebay.

Re: Chris Miller

So what? Let's say she made a bundle, but that's her right, she wrote the books and regardless of whether she made x amount of gbp last year, that doesn't strip her of her right to nip ebay in the arse.

I say go get them, JK!

While nobody would want to see pirate copies of their work on ebay, she is a multi millionaire.

I guess she is looking beyond Harry Potter when her popularity may decline. I'm not sure she can create another line of books as successful as the Potter books.

"Immense humiliation and harassment" - terms some people link to Ebay's (and PayPal's) terms of service.

On the couple of occasions I had to deal with eBay support I found their service to be slow, incompetent and inefficient.

Like someone said: eBay's motto seems to be "the customer is expendable".

JK Rowling maybe be loaded, but so are the founders of eBay, so THAT argument wins no sympathy from me. At least JK does HER job properly.

Nah, I say "Go, girl, and hit them for all you can!".

"Immense harassment and humiliation to eBay" indeed.... Hah!

Ebay sellers are fed up with ever increasing commission fees; buyers are fed up with getting scammed. But where else is there to go?

Have a google for "SS2BM" where disgruntled Ebayers can take part in an event called 'Summer Solstice Blue Moon". The idea is to raise the profile of alternatives to Ebay.

eBay couldn't care less about piracy. I bought a boxed set of DVDs through eBay advertised as being originals in the original shrink wrap. The buyer had a several-thousand rating, was an eBay top-seller, his own shop - you name it. In short, I trusted the eBay system.

The disks were pirated DVD-Rs (very well printed). I contacted eBay straight away, but their answer was pretty much 'get stuffed'. I filed a dispute and made clear I was willing to provide the disks to eBay as evidence. They ruled against me. When I went to their pages that talk about piracy and tried to raise the issue as a case of breach of copyright I got the standard 'eBay takes all cases of breach of copyright extremely seriously' automatic response, then nothing.

Not that the original copyright holders were much more interested. So much for that F---ing annoying unskipable advert FACT puts on the front of every DVD.

Six months later I got scammed on Amazon when one of their resellers (again very high reputation, claiming original disks) shipped blatant fakes. To their credit Amazon did refund the money, but they have never closed the seller's account.

I can only conclude these companies make too much money from buyers prepared to accept pirated goods to go to the trouble of enforcing copyright.

If eBay did care about piracy they'd employ a team of 'counterfeit hunters' to spend all their time just looking for fakes & scams in the most popular areas of eBay that fakes & scams appear in. But the only way listings are pulled and accounts suspended are when someone rats on the listings/sellers, apparently a lot of the time it's rival sellers trying to quash their competition.

But the lowly bidder doesn't really have much weight when it comes to informing eBay about counterfeit DVDs etc, if the DVDs in the listing look authentic (ie, all the relavent age rating, content specs & most importantly a fake barcode on the back) then there's extremely little chance of the auction getting cancelled, even when the content on the DVDs haven't even been officially released on DVD anywhere in the world, and even when the copyright owner is a VERO member and informs eBay the auction listings are for items breaking copyright laws.

From eBay's point of view it would be counter-productive to put more effort into stopping it because of the cost involved and the reduced revenue from no sales of counterfeit goods through their site.

I've recently had disputes with 2 Chinese suppliers on Ebay purporting to supply from UK address's. They goods were either not as described or just didn't arrive. Ebay were useless but Paypal were surprisingly supportive.

In the case of none delivery I got my money back less £15 and in the other case the whole amount.

Also if you dig around in Paypal's automated phone system you can eventually speak to a real live human who I found was very helpful. Action within 2 days of phone call, now that's why I continue to use Paypal.

How can you damage what doesn't exist?

Matt

>>now that's why I continue to use Paypal.<<

But you actually noticed that PayPal is a) no auction house itself, b) that PayPal is a payment processor only c) PayPal and EBay are in essence the same company under the same ownership?

Carry on trying to sell your stuff over Paypal pal. If you should ever succeed we all would be interested to hear about it.

Your comment is rejected because of missing knowledge...

I cannot agree more! Once you are in their system, they are in control over everything.

E-Bay dragging it's heels and refusing to take action against a nefarious seller who generates profits?

Perish the thought!

Whether or not JK 'has plenty of money' seems besides the point to me. If some impoverished reader would rather scavenge across the web for a free copy of her latest book than pony up the cash, so be it. But printing, binding and selling them?

Come on now, I think that's pushing it.

Maybe its me being Mexican, but copyright infringement is so commonplace over here, that someone ratting out "PIRACY!!!" would just get laughed upon. Even by the cops!

Then of course, paying full price and then getting duped by receiving pirated goods ... well that would infuriate anyone. Especially if it's baaad quality. (Or not even what you asked, I remember a friend getting reamed when he bought "Spiderman (2002)", then found out he had actually been sold that crappy 70's "spiderman" movie. Ow.)

But there's a lot of semi-legal stuff on sale in eBay or MercadoLibre (the Latin American eBay): some sellers buy stuff in the US, smuggle it illegally, then sell it by MercadoLibre. Voila! Your illegal imports are sold "legally" and you've successfully circumvented import laws.

Now I don't see eBay going after these guys ... they make up most sales in the MercadoLibre subsidiary.

I've noticed that on her site, Rowling often states that readers shouldn't buy or believe "leaked" manuscripts on eBay, but that doesn't go as far as harassment or libel, does it?

It's self evident that such a large service will be crap.

The definition of large successful online service is something where, to be viable, the number of customers / users / transactions needs to be huge, orders of magnitude higher than equivalent 'real life' based operations can do with bums and seats and brick buildings.

It's what all the blather about e-commerce is.

I suspect many people reading this IT related web site create such web based crap on a daily basis. It's 'computer says no' writ large...so large that there's no branch or shop to walk into for Little Britain to film.

Do you really expect sites like Paypal, Ebay and even things like Myspace to have enough people sitting there deleting listings and profiles / rude messages and sorting out who is right and wrong in every dispute? The simple ratio of scammers / posters to staff will tell you what you need to know. They can't possibly keep ahead of it.

e.g look what this site does, we post a message and then it's checked. A human check doesn't scale and remain cost effective. A site that allows punters to post that does scale has to simply allow all posts [well, they might try to filter $%£$ off and £$%$£ you $£%£$%, but computer filters are poor] and then try to hire a few to mop up the worse of the damage [often 'hire' means find someone slightly less unwashed from the 'community' that they won't have to pay - which in itself adds to the problem 'Why was my message deleted? / Why was I banned?' becomes the most talked about subject.

That is basically what Ebay have to do because its users are too tight fisted to shop elsewhere, so they aren't about to pay for a secure, moderated auction-that-isn't-an-auction service.

So, if your DVDs are pirated on ebay it's probably because DVDs are worth about £3 if you buy them there. Perhaps there are plenty of mugs around to push the price up above that, so you're scammed to begin with.

The listing is worth pennies to ebay. Hiring someone to delete that listing a prior and worry about your griping when you can't spot a good thing being too good, would need money. But you are actually hoping it'll be free, some kind of 'customer service' that you get for paying them a few pennies [and only then because the sellers pay it to them]

If you succeed they'll give up the few pence they've made. If you were lucky enough to get someone to look rather than a stock message, they'll see that of the 10000 or whatever transactions that guy did, no one else cared.

You say it yourself, he looked legit. Why else do you think they offer any kind of "protection" ? So, they assume you're probably the scammer. If that idea hurt, just accept that for every seller that's a scammer there's at least one buyer that is too. The truth might well be that, if the DVD is fake the seller didn't know - he wanted cheap stock to sell to folk who wanted cheap dvds - both parties are an opportunity knocking for scammers.

But note - if you go to trading standards about the dodgy stuff you've bought, you'll be stuck with it, whatever the outcome, because trading standards will know that you were aware the goods were dodgy. So, sell your dodgy stuff on, and plead ignorance is the better bet. Hence ebay - most buyers won't know, and, after all, you bought the DVDs.

In the alternative - Why not just buy your DVDs from a store and check them before you leave the shop? Obviously "because they were cheaper on Ebay" and that's your problem - watch the real hustle, the basic premise of any scam is finding someone who is greedy or wants a bargain.