Unlike the blog, this post has little to do with China; yet it serves as a strong reminder that global markets have both advantages and disadvantages. Just like Internet tends to absorb all the mess from around the world, web sites targeting global markets get their own fair share. Perhaps Chinese are indeed wise to keep everything local (avoiding the import of less likable industries)?

There is been a lot written about eBay scamming. There are bots that crawl and build feedback just to get a few freebies in high-stake deals. There is all that spam trying to lure the user into sharing identity credentials. But I’m now going to share my scoop on my recent experience with high-stake deals as a seller.

Saturday evening I put up a 1-day listing of an IBM laptop, expecting it to receive maximum exposure due to a higher audience on a weekend.

I start the bid at the usual 0.01 to get the bidding going. All would seem as usual (like a few years ago) if it wasn’t for the number of high-value bids I started to receive within the first 30 minutes. But I wait until the next day hoping that the abnormal activity is indeed natural. Then one hour before the end there is even a bigger activity with prices jumping 20, 30, 60 times the actual price of my laptop. Immediately I began to look at buyers’ profiles, canceling and blocking the more suspicious ones - still not quite sure of their actual purpose; after all, I’m the seller! Certainly the idea of tricking me into wiring the money via Western U. is just plain dumb (once again, I’m the seller!).

In the end, under my close supervision, someone with a legitimate feedback wins for a reasonable price. I of course follow the usual procedure and wait. And then the strategy begins to unfold. First I receive a spoofed email from eBay telling me that money has been deposited and put on hold. Of course instructions on how to send my item to Nigeria were also provided. Out of curiousity, I forwarded an email to eBay to which I then got a reply stating that the account was hijacked (but not disabled by eBay?). I then receive a second email directly from the buyer instructing me to send the laptop to a certain address in Nigera.

So what is the lesson here? Scammers are no longer aiming for bank accounts and money transfers - they don’t mind a few ThinkPads for a change (after all how else can they proceed with thier business without a laptop?).

Now, I do want to end this on a different note, so here is the morale of the story. While U.S. has been leading Internet development, global online market places, global portals and global search engines, the rest of the world quitely focused on specialized markets and locals. While eBays and Yahoos are constantly observing their expenses grow due to all the world’s mess piling up in front of their doorsteps, other sites like Rambler & Sohu continue to benefit from growing local markets that are simply prone to Nigerian poster boys and their scams. It all leads me to wonder about the future of the Internet (and whether eBay, in its current form, has place in it)?

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