phsc.ca

Alan Tessier of Ottawa and his new camera

Toronto.  In 2005, ebay was a popular source of rare cameras and images much desired by collectors of photographic material. Some sellers gained sufficient experience to ‘sell’ their skill to those who had a one-off sale of items. There was the odd ‘bad apple’ amongst the sellers. In one case, a seller ran what turned out to be a ‘Ponzi‘ scheme – the owners of the sold goods were paid from the sale of later goods; the earnings being spent by the actual seller instead of going to the owner of the goods.

In another ‘scheme’ I was made aware of, a person off shore posing as a disappointed buyer would send a cheque sum many times more than the item he ‘lost’ on ebay was worth, asking the seller if he could send an alternate item plus a bank draft for the balance. The so called buyer relied on bank policy of withholding payment for 14 days until the foreign cheque cleared. By the time the cheque bounced as a fake, the ‘buyer’ expected to have the so-called balance of funds in hand and would disappear.

When we still met in person, our then 1st VP who conducted a lot of business through ebay, noted that the rules had changed to offer better protection to the buyer. Unfortunately the swing was so heavy that sellers ended up at serious risk of any given sale being rejected and actually costing them money or worse.

This hit home recently when Les Jones, our past president, etc. sent me a link to a CBC article written by Dan Taekema · CBC News on June 9th and titled, “Camera sale shemozzle puts focus on how eBay policies affect sellers“. So today it is, “caveat venditor” – seller beware rather than, “caveat emptor” – buyer beware.