It seemed too good a bargain to miss, a spanking new Bugaboo baby buggy, the favorite of fashion-conscious parents, for less than half the normal price.
Yusuf Hatia and his wife Sarah Taylor, who are expecting their first child, were among the many who spotted the offer on the Internet auction site eBay and dashed off an email expressing their interest.
But, of course, as the consumer experts are always at pains to stress, if it seems like too good a bargain to be true, it probably is.
Hatia, a 32-year-old marketing consultant in the UK, and Taylor, 30, a teacher, were drawn into a simple but clever scam involving fake websites and COD emails.
They are not alone. There have been many hundreds of cons across the world in which eBay bargain hunters have been ripped off.
The potential dangers were highlighted this week when it emerged that a teenager from south Wales tricked site users out of ?45,000 by promising them electrical goods which turned out not to exist.
But the fraud does not stop there. The virtual auction house, beloved of the wife of the British prime minister who used it to buy designer shoes, has become an online flea market for illicit goods ranging from pirate music to antiquities of dubious origins.
The company insists it is doing all it can to clamp down on the sale of illegal goods -- it told The Guardian newspaper that only this week it caught a person who was trying to illicitly trade a very large hoard of coins.
But eBay acknowledges that its size -- it has 114 million users across the world and 10 million items on sale at any one time -- makes it difficult to police.
Not all are convinced it is doing enough. One expert in pirate DVDs, whose job involves liaising with the company, said: "On the one hand eBay is willing to cooperate when it is pointed out that something is not right but it does not seem to be very proactive about nailing the bad guys."
Hatia's and Taylor's case is a good example of how buyers hoping for a cut-price deal are tempted away from the relative safety of the site.
After expressing his interest in the buggy via the site, Hatia, of east London, was contacted directly -- not through eBay -- by the supposed seller and offered a red Bugaboo "Frog" for US$550. The "seller" told him she would hand over the buggy to the carrier, TNT.
It would notify Hatia when it had the buggy and he would send the cash to her via the transfer service Western Union and give TNT the payment details.
Once TNT had delivered the buggy, he would instruct the carrier to release the payment information so she could collect the money.
The trick in such cases is that the real, respectable TNT carrier is not involved at all. Emails purporting to come through TNT come straight from the con artists. The links to sites which are included on the "seller's" email are to fake TNT sites created by the fraudsters. The victim is releasing the payment details straight to those behind the deception.
Hatia became suspicious and pulled out. As a marketing expert he sees the skill in tempting him with a clever choice of product.
TNT has come across around 40 such cases in the UK, involving a range of goods. The giant US carriers have received many hundreds of complaints.
Garreth Griffith, head of safety for eBay in the UK, said only 0.01 percent of the transactions carried out on the site could be confirmed as fraud.
He had not come across the TNT scam but pointed out there were warnings on eBay about the dangers of trading off-site and sending money by electronic transfer.
Griffith said 1,000 people around the world worked on security issues for eBay. High- and low-tech innovations were continually being introduced to make fraud more difficult.
But the bottom line for the company is that buyers in the virtual world should use the same common sense they would use in a street market.
ROLLER-COASTER RIDE: More than five earthquakes ranging from magnitude 4.4 to 5.5 on the Richter scale shook eastern Taiwan in rapid succession yesterday afternoon Back-to-back weather fronts are forecast to hit Taiwan this week, resulting in rain across the nation in the coming days, the Central Weather Administration said yesterday, as it also warned residents in mountainous regions to be wary of landslides and rockfalls. As the first front approached, sporadic rainfall began in central and northern parts of Taiwan yesterday, the agency said, adding that rain is forecast to intensify in those regions today, while brief showers would also affect other parts of the nation. A second weather system is forecast to arrive on Thursday, bringing additional rain to the whole nation until Sunday, it
LANDSLIDES POSSIBLE: The agency advised the public to avoid visiting mountainous regions due to more expected aftershocks and rainfall from a series of weather fronts A series of earthquakes over the past few days were likely aftershocks of the April 3 earthquake in Hualien County, with further aftershocks to be expected for up to a year, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Based on the nation’s experience after the quake on Sept. 21, 1999, more aftershocks are possible over the next six months to a year, the agency said. A total of 103 earthquakes of magnitude 4 on the local magnitude scale or higher hit Hualien County from 5:08pm on Monday to 10:27am yesterday, with 27 of them exceeding magnitude 5. They included two, of magnitude
CONDITIONAL: The PRC imposes secret requirements that the funding it provides cannot be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Emma Reilly said China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday. At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is
Taiwan’s first drag queen to compete on the internationally acclaimed RuPaul’s Drag Race, Nymphia Wind (妮妃雅), was on Friday crowned the “Next Drag Superstar.” Dressed in a sparkling banana dress, Nymphia Wind swept onto the stage for the final, and stole the show. “Taiwan this is for you,” she said right after show host RuPaul announced her as the winner. “To those who feel like they don’t belong, just remember to live fearlessly and to live their truth,” she said on stage. One of the frontrunners for the past 15 episodes, the 28-year-old breezed through to the final after weeks of showcasing her unique