The naivety of many buyers and the lack of any buyer protectionfor motor vehicles has made eBay motors a magnet for fraud for as long as I've been here, which is over 20 years. Motorhomes are often the bait.
In a TV programme about organised crime, a senior police officer reported that one criminal gang alone had registered "multiple hundreds" of fake accounts on eBay to place fraudulent listings for non-existent motor vehicles.
There is so much that eBay could do prevent buyers falling for these scams. Something which would cost them nothing would be to message winning buyers to remind them that there is no buyer protection (which many don't realise) and suggest simple checks to make before paying. Or they could use AI to identify what are sometimes fairly obvious indicators of fraud. But eBay doesn't accept suggestions from users and I don't recall any occasion when an eBay rep has joined the discussion here when desperate buyers have lost their whole payments for a non-existent vehicles.
In fairness, the number of such cases reported here does seem to have reduced, so maybe eBay has done something behind the scenes. All that ordinary members can do is to use the link provided in every listing to report it. Some users have told us that they reported multiple listings, with no action taken by eBay. Whether this is customary or exceptional I don't know. You can perhaps find out by reporting the listing in question.
