The above book "Dawn of the eBay deadbeats" contains, according to Amazon.com, "stories told by those who have been suckered, snookered, pinched, and robbed while buying and selling on eBay."  None of these stories is unique.  Might you be one of them?

How is this possible? How does eBay stay afloat with so much fraud and criticism shot at them? What of the various class action suits that claim eBay isn't all it says? One article I saw mentioned a suit seeking $9.3 million in damages. And, there've been others.

What of the claims, that eBay itself and not just sellers, are bidding near auction end times to boast winning prices? Is there any truth to this claim? And, back to the eBay auctioneers themselves . . . exactly how much fraud is going on behind the screens of auctioneers? Will we ever know?

I wish I could answer these questions but I can't. What I can do is share what I have been witness to . . . the experiences that a couple of friends and I have had with eBay.

I first got interested in writing about eBay over a year ago.

It just so happened that a friend was one of many 'victims' testifying in the latest eBay class action suit. She wanted me to tell her story. My friend, an artist, had a storefront on eBay in which she displayed and sold her art. She still sells on eBay but only with a carefully executed regiment. She has a much more discerning attitude these days.

There is a reason behind that change of heart. In fact, when someone told her about the suit going on, her frustrations regarding losses and experiences lead her to join the ranks of those victimized already committed to testifying about their experiences.

Each incident in itself could have been a mistake and easily corrected by eBay, my friend reasoned, but that's not quite the way it went down. First, she was billed numerous times for the same auctions or the auction fees were miscalculated and she was overcharged. When she complained, instead of crediting her, they billed her again. She had also taken advantage of a special eBay had for a very basic storefront. It was only $10 a month or so she thought. Instead of receiving what she had signed up for, without permission or request of confirmation, she was upgraded to a full-blown storefront with all the trimmings. She complained again . . . but many months later, she was still fighting eBay to credit her and remove options on her account she hadn't requested.                         

She found then that many others in New Mexico , her state of residence, had similar complains that continued to go without resolution. Contacting eBay by phone wasn't an easy option. At least, it was for my friend. With no tech support hotline, all correspondence and complaints had to be done by email and through the eBay website interface. It is my experience, by the way, that this interface, with all its lackings, is probably one of the most frustrating of communicating tools in existence on the worldwide web today.

These eBay users were all getting the identical feeling. They felt that eBay was looking the other way on all these 'mistakes' . . . Although, all tiny in comparison to the huge revenues being generated at eBay daily, they knew the total damages could amount to many tens, or even, hundreds of thousands of dollars if it is assumed that such random errors are but a mere sampling of the multitude of similar occurrences in the greater eBay mix. The initiators of the Class Action Suit obviously thought so.

The case finally settled out of court. The official word is that eBay won. There was a settlement but the amount was immaterial, according to my friend. The lawyers donated all of it to charity.

Nope, the money didn't matter. It was a small figure in comparison to what they had originally asked for. No, it was point of it all. To take on a giant like eBay and make them accountable for the many problems and inefficiencies in their systems was well worth the satisfaction gained.

Then there is my experience . . .

Not long ago I was on eBay looking for a professional camera. I was eager to see what I would find both new and used. However, it had been quite a while since I'd last taken any time to even browse on eBay. In fact, I had to look up my username and password. I had forgotten it.

One thing I noticed right away was that usernames were not given in the auctions 'listings' generated from a simple search anymore. I found this quite annoying. It made it a bit harder to shop from a general list if you wanted to avoid certain auctioneers. Anyway . . . I made due.

Pretty soon I happened upon an auction that sounded a bit too good to be true. It intrigued me. I guess it was because I like solving puzzles. The auction was very unclear as to what actually was being offered for sale. Many items were mentioned in the ad but not specifically 'as' included in the sale offerings. So, I emailed the seller. This person had listed an email in the body of the text. It said I should email first before making any bids. I went in pretty naïve I guess. I didn't suspect foul play. I didn't think anything of these facts until I widen my search and started making comparisons.

Moments later, I found several other auctions with exactly the same photos, description and format as the previous one but the seller was different. Again, I didn't think that so strange. I figured it could be the same person double-listing under two names to increase their chances for finding buyers. I hadn't yet heard from the first email so I wrote the second seller then with the same enquiry made to the first and also mentioned this similarity and doubling of listings. That was my second mistake. My first mistake was sending an email at all to either party.

A few hours passed and I got a reply back from the first guy. He said that the Canon camera I enquired about was 100% brand new, in 'the' box, with the full TWO-year standard manufacturer's warranty. Big red flag went up. I spent a number of years working as a manufacturer's rep for Canon so I knew for a fact that they offered only a one-year warranty. Any legitimate seller would have known this. In fact, anyone, who's bought electronics in the last 10 years, would know.

I went back and looked for his original auction listing then. I just wanted to refresh my memory of what was said so I could better respond. The auction did not exist anymore! Someone had removed it.

I did not write back. Nor did I get a response from the second auctioneer I emailed.

Now rather suspicious and also very curious, I began searching, outside the camera category, for some of the 'suspect' phrases within these two sets of previously found auctions. I started finding patterns in the way phrases were used. They always had an email listed in the text body with wording to the effect that the bidder should email them before making any bids. The word answer was often spelled answear. Is there such a spelling somewhere in the world? There must be. I found it by itself many times in other auctions without the other phrase patterns' accompanying. Either, it's a real word or these guys are pretty stupid or, even a worse case scenario would be that they did the misspellings and these similar phrases as a 'red herring' on purpose. This means that they might actually WANT their errors in the auctions to be detected.  Now, why would they want to do that? Think about the possibilities there one for a moment . . .

Yes, all these auctions were fraudulent. Big surprise, huh? I could not believe I had come face-to-face with a fraud ring. But, it gets more interesting . . .

So, what do I do? Simple. I reported all the auctions I found to eBay as suspicious and as possibly fraudulent. Of course, it wasn't that easy finding a suitable method to do the reporting. But that's another story.

Then, a funny thing happened just moments after making my report. Well, not such a funny thing really.

When I checked my email, there were several pages of emails from eBay saying I had placed auctions. There were 79 of them to be exact! I was in shock. I was horrified. What was going on? I was most perplexed.

I looked at the auctions that had been placed on my account in my name. They all had the same sort of patterns I had detected in the auctions I had reported.

I was now the one being victimized. Panic ran through me . . . I thought of all the charges that might soon be charged to my account and how much just the listings fees alone would be. I knew I had to act fact to avoid financial disaster.