Automated Scripts Overrun eBay Holiday Contest

turnkeylinux writes "TechCrunch is reporting that eBay is under fire from users because of a holiday giveaway contest gone awry. On Tuesday Nov. 25, eBay announced its $1 Holiday Doorbusters deals promotion, giving away 100 gifts on a daily basis, all for a $1 fixed price. The gifts ranged from jewelry, clothing, digital cameras, and GPS devices to a brand-new Chevrolet Corvette. The only catch is that there's no announcement on when these items are released or in which category they will be. But cheaters came up with a clever way of winning deals on an automated basis by continuously running scripts to bid on items for $1."

Time to offload some crap

[hansamurai]

Are these scripts still running. Seems like it's time to list a ton of stuff for a buck that wouldn't even sell at a garage sale. I wonder if they check the shipping price... could really nail them then.

Re:Time to offload some crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Just sell single paper sheet on the format of a postcard for 1$, you can even go so far to pay for the stamp, should make a profit of about 10 cents per item then :-)

Re:Time to offload some crap

[TheRealMindChild]

Sure, in a perfect ebay where people weren't unscrupulous, this might work. But you have to figure the case is more like, they opened a new account just for this bot (or maybe stole someone elses account), just in case they get caught, their "real" accounts won't get terminated. After their bot runs, they pick and choose what they want. They let the rest go, simply not paying for it.

Common theme

[thecalster]

I've seen this done on a few other websites as well... wowhead.com (World of Warcraft db) ran a contest where you had to find where 5 different pictures were located on the site. It wasn't the best contest as the name of the file name was the exact same that they used for the caption as the filename for the page. So what people ended up doing was caching the whole site and just doing a quick search for where file name *******.jpg was located at.

sell junk for 1 dollar

[Anonymous Coward]

just setup lots of auctions with bits of scrap paper for 1$ and set the P&P to $10.
In fact I have a load of junk mail I would like to sell on ebay.

Re:Time to offload some crap

[theaveng]

So now we have a solution where buyers can blackmail sellers with comments like, "Give me free shipping or I'll leave a negative on your account," and of course ebay won't do anything to stop the buyers from this blackmail.

>>>Buyers have few recourses if scammed by a bad seller.

Bullshit. I'm a buyer and I have LOTS of recourse for protecting myself:
- threaten to neg seller if he does not do the right thing (not very effective)
- file paypal complaint (you almost always win)
- file credit card chargeback (you win 100%)
- court lawsuit

The real problem is: Who protects the sellers? I had a buyer return an EMPTY envelope to me, and then she filed a credit chargeback to reverse $80 out of my account while she kept the PSP handheld. There was nothing I could do to stop this scam, or any future scams. It's the buyers who are best-protected, and the sellers who are most vulnerable.

Re:The internet is full of assholes...

[Technician]

If the automated scripts are just placing a $1 bid on everything they find, it sounds like a good time to ebay the contents of my penny jar...individually.

I was thinking more along the lines of state quarters, plus S&H and insurance. Maybe the next sale will be a money maker as the script kiddies find their liability for their purchases mount. If they relesed quarters at 1500 items to each sale item, it would kill the profitability of the scripts and the problem would go away.