/Big Mouth/ Captain Spanky’s Hoover Heaven

10/07/2007 | Filed under Discover > Big Mouth

Online auction house eBay is full of scammers, and now you can’t even trust the feedback system any more. It’s the season of the shafters

Call me a twisted old misanthrope, but I find that if you assume the worst about people, you’re rarely disappointed, and that’s doubly true online, where the lack of face to face contact turns even the most mild-mannered janitor into a foam-flecked fury. And of course, it also encourages people to shaft one another, and I don’t mean that in a good way.

If the shafters have a spiritual home, it’s eBay. They come out of the woodwork when you first list an item, making too-good-to-be-true cash offers that are, of course, too good to be true. They employ friends to bid up their wares; they bamboozle you with tiny print in the hope you won’t spot you’re bidding for a picture of a thing rather than the thing itself, and they ask you to send notebook computers to Nigeria. But at least you can trust the feedback system. Or can you? A friend of mine – let’s call him Jo, because that’s his name – bought a vacuum cleaner from a firm on eBay. The firm – let’s call it Captain Spanky’s Hoover Heaven, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment – wasn’t pretending to be a mere punter, and had a tiny amount of negative feedback. So Jo placed his order, and a pile of old crap arrived two months later. Naturally enough, he left something rather different to “A++++ - A GREAT EBAYER” in the seller’s feedback.

Then things got interesting. Jo got an email from a company he hadn’t heard of, whose staff told him that they were acting on behalf of Captain Spanky. “We’re very sorry you had a bad experience,” they said. “Let us make it up to you. If we give you £5 and a profuse apology, will you withdraw the feedback?” Jo said yes, and the firm generously upped its £5 to £50.

Jo’s an honest chap, so he kept his word and withdrew the negative feedback. As it turns out, Jo is more honest than the firm he was dealing with. As soon as the feedback was gone, so was the firm’s interest. “Where’s my money?” he asked. Ner ner ner!, the firm more-or-less replied.

Feeding back
I haven’t named the eBay seller because I can’t prove that it actually hired the sneaky sods in question, though I can’t think of any reason to believe otherwise. After all, the only person who gains from such a scam is Captain Spanky.

You have to admit, it’s a wonderful scam. Provided you don’t shaft absolutely everybody, your feedback rating just keeps on climbing, because when people look at your rating, they check one thing: the negative feedback. When you see a reasonable feedback number and few or no negative comments, it’s only natural to assume that the firm is on the level. So the next time you’re thinking of bidding, look at the numbers more carefully. If the seller has an unusually large proportion of silent customers, it may be Captain Spanky.