eBay Gets Heavy-Handed with a Good Samaritan

In looking for more scofflaws selling the fake yellow seal 'errors,' I came across a seller offering more of them, but with a twist.

This seller, unlike the others offering yellow-seal pseudo-errors, was creating fake auctions. If you clicked on one of his auctions, you would see a lengthy note about the scam artists along with links educating people about other faked items on eBay.

I wrote him a note to thank him for keeping up the good effort. He wrote back to say that he appreciated my kind words, but he was going to have to stop his good work because eBay had threatened to cancel his account. In other words, the auction giant will allow dozens of people to be duped out of thousands of dollars on a weekly basis, but if a few nice people step up to take matters into their own hands, eBay gets uppity.

I'm sure there's a happy compromise.