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It makes me wonder how many stolen items are sold on eBay. If you think about it, eBay has added a whole new avenue for circulating and getting rid of stolen goods. People no longer need a broker to get rid of hot items. All you have to do now-a-days is go online, head over to www.ebay.com create an account, most likely fake, and your good to go.

But one thing that I have never been able to find out, is if eBay even tries to stop this practice. In most cases, they probably don’t think twice about stolen items being sold, I doubt they even think once about it if you asked me. In my experience of using eBay, I noticed they seem to have almost no regards for most of their customers, so why would they care about people getting rid of hot items to other people. At least not until they get negative publicity about it and law enforcement shows up at their front door step.

In my opinion I would estimate that even though 68,000 dollars worth of stolen goods sounds like a large number, I would bet that this is one of the smaller fishes on eBay that sells stolen goods. Chance are, there is millions of dollars of stolen goods being sold on eBay by a group of people that no one has even looked into or even suspected.

Now if I was in charge of eBay I would change one minor thing during the sign up process to prevent scams, fraud, and other easily avoided mishaps such as stolen goods. Now I know of no method that is fool proof, but this would go a long ways to deterring people from doing unsavory activities.  As it is right now, if you get banned or your account is deleted, you can sign up  and make another account and start all over again. If eBay really wants to protect their business name and be a service that people trust, then they really need to remove the ability to make multiple accounts with no form of identification.

The idea is nothing new, but they need to run their sign up much like online gambling places do. These places get some form of identification, such as a copy of the driver license, in most cases they ask for a copy of a voided check that has your name on it. I would not recommend eBay getting Social Security numbers. Right now there is such a stigma against giving this information out online. Even if you do get Social Security numbers from people it will add a new level of liability such as keeping or even having this information online, and frankly I don’t think it’s worth the security issues that are involved. In most cases people would rather go sign up else where, then to give out their social security number to an online place, no matter how much of a name brand they are.

Now I know it would be easy to fake, but it would deter a good amount of people from going through the hassle of having to fake this information. Now the larger groups of people that sell stolen / hot items, well they will still continue to do it, but at least this method would weed out the smaller guys who try to sell items on eBay. In most cases these people would go to other auction services, and make those auction services look bad when they are found out that they are allowing the selling of hot items. But it would save eBay a lot of negative publicity and bolster the company in to becoming an auction place that tries to take care of its customers.

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Just found this video - had to add it

Ebay "IT" Commercial

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7_u5p2PheE[/youtube]