Pity poor “airnxtz,” who got more than he bargained for when he asked MetaFilter’s advice on this sad story:
i bought a $3,000 item on ebay a laptop, i never recieved it, i paypaled him the money, and he transfered those funds to his bank account, and then withrdrew it. He then informed me that on the day he was going to ship it out, his car was robbed, and everything (including the laptop and $3,000 cash) was stolen…is this guy going to get away with it?
This question raised a red flag at MetaFilter, however, because airnxtz’s eBay profile showed he hadn’t recently bought a laptop. In fact, he’d recently sold one, and the buyer was complaining it never arrived.
MetaFilterians soon found that airnxtz been asking lots of questions about computer sales gone wrong. In October alone, he claimed, thieves had stolen two laptop computers he was shipping, replacing one with “a rock wrapped in bubble wrap” (October 8 posting) and another with “a jug of water” (October 15 posting).
These events gave extra meaning to airnxtz’s hypothetical question (October 30):
lets say i list an item for x amount of dollars, offering no shipping insurance. in the item description i state ‘by bidding on this auction buyer agrees that seller is not responsible for lost items or errors made by USPS’ now lets say the item gets lost in the mail, am i still obligated to refund the buyer, even though by bidding he agreed i would not be held liable for lost items in the mail?
Not surprisingly, airnxtz has received very bad eBay feedback as a seller. So why is his net feedback rating on eBay so high? Because his feedback as a buyer is good–he has bought many, many small-ticket items on eBay and paid for them promptly.
Note: I stumbled across this while researching reputation systems in general and eBay’s Feedback system in particular. Resnick and Zeckhauser’s study of eBay’s system is widely cited; fraudsters have found many ways to game the system..