Crime and EBay

The Internet has change modern crime dramatically. Throughout history the criminal mind has always chosen the path of least resistance to make the most lucrative buck. Electronic crime has become that brave, new world that offers the would-be criminal many chances of anonymity, deception and fraud – much more so than in the real world.
So it comes as no surprise that on-line auction sites have now become the number one consumer complaint in the US

Recently, I decided to buy a music CD from eBay.com, the top auction site.
It is a simple enough process, I found the CD that I wanted, there was a number of people selling the same CD, so I just chose one of the auctions and placed a bid.
A little later that day I was successful in winning the auction and sent the payment to the auction owner via Paypal (we shall call him Clive467 to protect the guilty) covering the price of the CD and postage.
This is a pretty straightforward transaction that millions of eBay users do every day. I waited for the CD to come in the mail, but it never arrived and this is where it starts to get interesting.

A couple of weeks passed so I sent a message to the Clive467 account on Ebay and PayPal asking about the delay.
Both mails were auto-returned with the details that the accounts had been closed. Now I don’t mean that the email accounts were closed – the actual Ebay and PayPal accounts were closed. Also the web site that Clive467 had – who is, or was, an Ebay power seller (A great deal of power sellers on Ebay have their own web site) was also gone. All very odd I thought.

In pursuit of some resolution for the CD that I never received, I continued doing some further research.
First I used the “whois” lookup on NSI.com web site to discover the owner of Clive467’s web site, which also gave a telephone number. I then called the person named as the owner and actually got the real person on the telephone. It was Clive, the guy that I sent the money to, he seemed like a genuine kind of person – A little rough around the edges, but warm and friendly – not quite what I expected an Internet fraudster to sound like.
While speaking to Clive I realized that he doesn’t use the internet, has never heard of the web site and he certainly didn’t have my CD or payment.
In fact, he said during our conversation that he could use some money to pay for the electric bill for his home, a double-wide in a Houston trailer park, could I spare him $10?