These same fraudsters have been running the same scam for much longer than 6 months. I can't remember quite when we first noticed them, but for a while every Saturday morning in the TEA thread there was a rash of "The eBay fraudsters are back again. Reported them
again." postings. It's at least a year, probably longer.
I don't know if eBay are useless or powerless, but they seem to have completely failed to stop them. Just the hijacking of accounts is enough under UK law to get them charged with criminal offences, and similar offences exist in most jurisdictions so there's no barrier to stopping them. They
have to take money at some point for it to be a useful scam, and once there's a money trail there's a good chance of law enforcement tracking them down and charging them - repeated hacking is probably enough to get them locked up for long enough to prepare substantial fraud charges against them.
They're on eBay every weekend and eBay don't seem to even slow them down, I can only presume that eBay haven't even spoken to the police about it. If we've spotted a pattern one would hope that eBay had managed to by now but either they haven't or they don't care. Other than reporting the individual fraudulent items there don't seem to be any way to point out the pattern to eBay in case they really have missed it.
I guess one could do a BD139 and shitpost all over Twitter about it.
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