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Sunday 26 June 2016

More Ebay fraud

I recently reported on what seems to be a common Ebay scam - people selling 8gb memory cards as 32, 64 or even 512gb. The cards report themselves as the higher capacity, but when you copy files on to them, they give up after 8gb - or even sooner.

Some of the listings do actually warn you that this might be the case, but who reads the small print? Most listings don't even do that.

People buy the cards, give positive feedback, and only find out the problem when they've used the memory card for a long time, perhaps for their holiday photos and videos. And it fails, and there's not much they can do - is it worth making a fuss over a £3 purchase? Actually yes, it is. Because you'd be saving other people from a similar fate.

And now I've found more fraud. This is on ethernet adaptors and switches.

There's a lot of ethernet adaptors and switches listed as "gigabit", which means that they should run at 1000 megabits/second. But when you read the small print of the listing, it turns out that they only do 10 and 100. I've seen a *lot* of these.

I've bought a USB-ethernet adaptor which claims to be gigabit, even says 10/100/1000, and continues to claim it in the small print. When it arrives, I'll test it, and if it doesn't actually do gigabit, I'll request a refund.

I tried to report some of the worst cases to Ebay; when I last contacted them, they were quite proud of their reporting system. But that isn't going to work. You can only report them one at a time, and there's a *lot* of them. And your report has to choose a reason from a short list, and "item is fraudulently misrepresented" isn't there. And I can't see a way to email Ebay about the generic problem. And I don't think they'd be interested if I did.

Caveat emptor.

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