How to report ebay fraud to the police?

plamen_gb

plamen_gb

Messages
3,434
Name
Plamen
Edit My Images
Yes
Any information will be helpful! I will send brief information about the whole deal and why I'm going to the police.
 
Last edited:
plamen_gb said:
Any information will be helpful! I will send brief information about the whole deal and why I'm going to the police.
Click to expand...

I presume this is to do with your other 192 thread ?

Have you been on contact with eBay and have they said / suggested anything.

If you keep all your records, print things out and pop into your local police station, with everything you can.
 
Met Police e-Crime unit but don't hold your breath - as above eBay/Paypal may be more productive.
 
Was thinking about it, I have some paypal stuff to print too at least I know the same guy that got the lens lives on the same address
 
gramps said:
Met Police e-Crime unit but don't hold your breath - as above eBay/Paypal may be more productive.
Click to expand...

No - report to your local borough / station.

PCeU deal with large-scale organised internet-based fraud - eBay is rarely something of interest to them. Their main project at the moment is dealing with the hundreds of thousands of scam websites that appear in the run-up to Christmas and the Olympics. In any case, you can't report directly to them - they have cases sent to them by a central command structure.

I've investigated eBay scams myself with some success, but most of the time it was eBay and Paypal that proved to be the hindrance. Their security teams are based in Luxembourg, making it very difficult to force them to comply with court orders for the production of documents. The added complication is that most eBay frauds rarely involve the suspect being based in the UK.
 
Why aren't paypal getting more involved .

My eBay account was hacked, my phone pinged at 12:15am to say I'd just paid for a ps3 then a 5d mk2 , I changed the password immediately but they'd debited my PayPal account for over a grand

PayPal sorted it but it took 2 weeks to get the money back

They'd changed my address to somewhere in florida, I emailed the address to the local sheriff, within hours I had a reply asking for more details, a few hours after that I had a detective assigned to the case , they went to the address which was a PO box centre, emptied the box and shut it down

All that happened within 18 hours of me sending the email, I hope you get a similar response from the uk police
 
Photo Plod said:
No - report to your local borough / station.
Click to expand...

From previous experience going in at a 'local' level with a fraud involving £several thousand and having hand-held step-by-step paperwork, it was a complete waste of time ... had it not been for my bank it would have been lost forever - hope London is different.
 
gramps said:
From previous experience going in at a 'local' level with a fraud involving £several thousand and having hand-held step-by-step paperwork, it was a complete waste of time ... had it not been for my bank it would have been lost forever - hope London is different.
Click to expand...

You don't have a choice in the matter, unfortunately. It is not possible for members of the public to "leap frog" and take their cases to specialist units, unless it is prima facie too big for local investigators to handle - in which case, they will be the ones to refer it.

When harping on about policing, I only ever draw on my own experiences - I'd like to think if your case landed on my desk, I'd do a good job with it - but I'm not naieve enough to promise you that it'll always be the case wherever you go in London!

Frauds are a nightmare for investigators to prove; the sheer quantity of paperwork (through production orders, phone requests etc) is a nightmare, and the banks / mobile phone operators / eBay, etc, genuinely don't give a toss until the value is in the region of more than a few thousand pounds. The whole experience is like wading through treacle. It ends up taking months and tying up officers' time for a (usually) indefinite amount of time. The even sadder thing is that even if you do take the case on and make progress, by the time this huge bureaucratic machine has run its course, the fraudsters have usually moved on - especially with anything internet-based.

Unfortunately, since we don't have the resources to investigate everything as fully as we'd like, Fraud is not a priority crime anywhere - unless it's on a major scale - as far as I know. At a local level, it sits very much at the bottom of the heap, with Robbery, Serious Violence, Burglary and Domestic Violence all taking priority - to say nothing of rapes, murders and so on which are dealt with at a specialist level. It's not great, it's not right, but them's the breaks.

Personally, I always enjoyed investigating frauds - I took down an organised Nigerian gang scamming people out of properties across the UK last year, a travel agent ripping off hundreds of tourists by booking non-existent tickets, the accounts manager of a huge online poker company setting up fake commission accounts and creaming off the money, and have another interesting sub-judice case involving the a manager for a major brewery defrauding the company out of tens of thousands coming up at court soon. Each of these cases took around a year from start to finish (but I was working on several cases at any one time).
 
Last edited:
wack61 said:
Why aren't paypal getting more involved .
Click to expand...

At a guess, because they've already made their money and can't be arsed to alienate a satisfied customer (the fraudster) to keep the seller happy.
 
Nod is totally right, they said they have done everything they could and that was about it :D I've asked what did they actually do and the answer was ignorant silence :D Ebay said this has nothing to do with them....
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top