The retiree waging war on the eBay tractor scammers

One retired man has taken up the task of clearing eBay of the various dodgy listings that pop up, including those involving 'bargain' tractors!

I don't want a tractor – not even a small one.

I could not even get one into my postage-stamp-sized garden. But if I did suddenly develop a taste for agriculture, then I suspect eBay is the last place I would look. I have never used eBay – I like to know who I am dealing with. And if I bought farm equipment, I would literally need to kick the tyres before purchase.

Still, there must be some people looking for bargain tractors (and bulldozers as well) online for this scam to work. In a nutshell, the scam merchants hijack someone's eBay account, offer a tractor for between a fifth and a tenth of its real value (they are not cheap!), ensnare someone into sending the cash and then disappear. Simple.

Don't mess with One-Eyed Jack

But they have a foe – a scambuster who goes by the name of One-Eyed-Jack. He's devoted the past eight years to ensuring phoney offers are removed before they cause harm. Based in Essex, and using a secret system involving nearly 40 specific searches, he has helped remove over 45,000 dodgy high value items over this time, either via eBay or through the owner of the hacked account.

“It all started in 2005 when I wanted a laptop. I saw one that looked really good value but I started to be suspicious when the seller appeared to be a male but the email address was that of a woman. I took it from there,” he says.

“If I had sent the money, I would have lost it and no amount of eBay help would have recovered my cash.”

One recent posting promised a four-year-old low mileage tractor for just £2,500. The description and the photos were from a real sale, down to admitting a problem with the brake cable – the genuine seller was very upfront – but the original price was around £13,000, a thousand pounds or so less than a dealer.

How the hijacking scam works

This scam starts with one of those just-about-legal websites that offer one million email addresses for $100. Fraudsters then send them all a message saying that their eBay accounts had been suspended, so they must log on again via a link. A huge number go to people like me who do not have eBay accounts. But that does not matter.

The vast majority of people with eBay accounts recognise this as a phishing attack so they delete it. Butit only takes a couple of people to respond, and the fraudsters are in. They have enough details to take over someone's eBay pages so the $100 is money well spent.

Our scambuster says there are differences between the real and the phoney tractor offers, other than the £2,500 machine does not exist. And these are the contact details. The stolen account may refer to a man while having a woman's name. Equally, the alleged sellers have never before offered farm machinery. It is very unlikely someone with an eBay site devoted to vintage clothes or semi-conductors would have a sideline in tractors.

And there is “strange language” - poor English in the part that is not copied from a real offer and key give-away phrases such as “the quick price” and “advertising for a good friend”.

Taking down the scammers

One-Eyed-Jack sends the victims an email to warn them to change their passwords immediately. And he also alerts eBay. He finds scams several times a day but oddly rarely over a weekend. “It seems they work a five day week,” he says.

He keeps precise records. “On just one day last week, between noon and 16 hours later, 11 new scam listings went up, and I'm pleased to say that 11 new scam listings went down. Deleted, removed, erased - and very probably because of my reporting/whistleblowing. Having said that, only five of them were deleted were by eBay - the other six were removed by the owners of the hacked accounts, all of whom I had emailed.”

Why tractors, a very specialised field, and not bicycles or laptops? It seems potential victims are suspicious of these more common items. The scam merchants need something of high value to make their racket work – in the past they tried cars and top of the range hi-fi but buyers have become careful. Offering a tractor is clever – buyers think farmers are honest and maybe need cash quickly rather than wait for a better price.

And if One-Eyed-Jack can do it, why can't eBay itself?

As he puts it: “I'm retired so I have time but I can't do this 24/7. I do this - including alerting those whose emails have been hijacked - on a purely altruistic basis. I would like eBay to employ me a consultant as this would increase confidence in what was on sale.”

If you want to contact him or get more information, you can go to One Eyed Jack's Facebook page.

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