The scam procedure I see on ebay US is as follows:
- Someone either hijacks or buys an ebay account with a lot of feedback (a power seller or so)
- They sign up for ebay's seller api
- They use a scraping bot or scraping software that imports the images, details and listing info of thousands of already existing posts, either new or old
- They upload thousands of posts with incredibly low auction prices
- Every listing is an auction to show up as the cheapest price on ebay
- listing details says "this item is available for purchase for $5000, all bids will be removed (impossible without fee) buy at scam shorturl address
- scam shorturl address listed in photos
- They upload hundreds of listings a second
- ebay takes about 2 days to start auto removing posts, likely from monitoring a large anomaly of buyer complaints
- seller account still exists after caught and listings removed, likely just gets ebay seller api access revoked
This cycle happens over and over, rinse and repeat. It is honestly an excellent way of getting free advertising. You get all the views because all your listings are the lowest price & newest listed. You put in 0 effort in taking photos and adding detailed descriptions. You have 0 liabilities as a seller because auctions never end, all get cancelled. There are no fees because eventually your listings get pulled for violating some ebay policy.
I do not condone this kind of activity, but I am surprised it is not happening more often.
Ebay simply does not care. The executives get paid so much for just keeping the ship afloat that it doesn't matter.
Ebay executives have made out promoting scalping throughout a pandemic.
Ebay executives have knowingly tormented a random couple in Massachusetts for criticizing ebay seller changes.
They have no boundaries anymore.