how do the conmen who ask for mobile numbers and advertise motorhomes get onto e bay?

[dav1748sport]

Many adverts for motorhomes appear on e bay with rediculously low prices and the "vendor" requests you leave a mobile number so they can contact you. This of course takes you out of the ebay rules and when you get conned you have no comeback. How on earth do these conmen get on e bay?

[john1297576]

How the conmen get on ebay is not the problem, if people used common sense and did not pay large sums of money for something they have never seen and examined, and rely on a photograph probably copied from a Car Magazine, Scammers will flourish. If no one bought, there would be no point in listing 1000s of phony cars for sale.

[red_magpie]

How on earth do these conmen get on e bay?

Very easily - anyone can open an account here.

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 motor vehicles.

Bogus motor vehicle sales are attractive to criminals as these are not covered by eBay's money back guarantee. We know from questions asked here that many buyers are hopelessly naive and just assume that eBay will always protect them from fraud. They won't!

None of us knows the full scale of motor vehicle fraud on eBay, but on one day alone we heard of three buyers who had each lost over £6,000 paying for non-existent vehicles. It would go a long way to prevent this if eBay warned all winning buyers in the motors section that there is no buyer protection, and that they shouldn't pay until they have seen and inspected the vehicle properly. But I think eBay is more concerned to preserve the illusion that eBay is safe than to educate buyers about the risks.

[andrewlaidlaw1979]

They rely on people gullability to reply to these adds.

When the ad is only leaves the bare minium or just says contact me for more information. Either way is the lack of people reporting such suspect listings is why these scammers are getting away with it albecause they know how ebay works in that 10 listing reports or less they wont get flagged up by ebays bots but where as 20 to 30 reports for the same listing in the same week might get it flagged up for an actual person to look at.

But even then it all comes down to the wording of the listing really as in if all the listing is saying MOT'd & X, Y make model for camber vans or is located at whatever location if its something more of perminat holiday home they know that they can ealy con people out of whatever amount of money if they can get a call if the wordin on their listing/s are worded is such a way to get people to send in their mobile number & then they can just con people into paying deposits on items that don't exist or at worst sell the same item multiple times & no ones the wiser untill some or all the interested parties end up meeting at the same location where the so called item is.