New ( to me) ebay search scam
 

Hi All:

Wanted to know if any of you have seen this ebay search scam? I search for Ashburn in all catagories, and check the "include description" box.

A ton of some guys tools come up. I assume the guy listing the tools is in Ashburn VA. which I run up against from time to time, but NO. I look all over the listing and see no Ashburn anywhere.

I guess I missed it so I do a Control F, type in Ashburn and still nothing! But Wait! There is a tiny teeny box that comes up I can't even read the word in it. I click on this tiny box and a TON of these tiny boxes show up with other names etc. I can't read.

None of these are visible in the listing until I did my Control F

I tried to report this to ebay but they give you about 35 letters to describe the issue which is impossible in this instance.

Here is one of the listings I am talking about.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/23426505907...hKECR#viTabs_0

See if you get the same results and try my Control F , type in Ashburn and scroll down to find the tiny box, click on it and see the other tiny boxes come up

Does anyone have an ebay phone number to report this?

Follow up on the above.

I just discovered if you go to:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/23426505907...hKECR#viTabs_0

and scroll down after the description there is a big blank space. If you right click a few times in this blank space all the lines of words this guy adds to get his item to show up in searches is there. Most are so small they are unreadable.

Not a scam
 

More just annoying as ($&%! Adding search words but in a shady way. Just don't search on tools.

Not all of his listings have the word tools in it so that does no good. All his listings show up in any search for the words he put in the tiny "unseen" hidden boxes

I'd be pissed too if some guys tools came up in my search.

It's just someone spamming a bunch of keywords in the description field. They're using white text so you don't see it. Just highly the text in the description field with your mouse and you'll see it. Here's what he wrote below:

Note, this is fairly common to see on Craigslist. But you can report this guy for spamming keywords to eBay. They probably won't do anything about it though because they lack competency.

You can report the listing pretty easily. Just above the item description field, to the right, there is a link that reads "Report item". Then it'll take you to a page that looks like the image below. You can select 'Listing Practices', then 'Search and browse manipulation', then 'Keyword spamming'.

https://i.imgur.com/o6F4SeC.png

If you use them they are tools. If not, just junk.

I started this and as I said in my Original post there are not enough spaces allowed in the description box to properly tell them what s going on as the page is basicallly blank. Most likely one of the ebay people would just look at the page and think it looks OK

I just wrote something along the lines of "This seller is spamming thousands of keywords in hidden white font in the item description section."

Thank you, guys... I would wonder why odd stuff would show up in what I thought was a good search.

White font... Early computer days, VIC-20 and Commodore 64 days, we'd have the computer, a monitor, and either a cassette tape drive or a floppy disc drive. Eventually I got a printer. In pre printer days, if I looked at the directory of a disk with bought software on it, the directory / list of programs would be blank or near blank, but the screen would show that there was no or little space left on the disk. We couldn't copy files if we couldn't see their names. With the printer, one day I printed the mystery directory, and there it was! A long directory that didn't show on the monitor screen... If a file was named CAT there was immediately after it the 'delete' key image (I think an inverse @) so that the printer printed CAT@@@ but when that was thrown to the monitor the CAT was deleted as soon as it was thrown up there. Old technology clever... kinda like that guy putting that long list of words in his listing.

That's quite helpful to know. Thanks for the info.

I have heard of the same practice being used on resumes that are filtered by automated systems - the computer picks up on the words, but a person would not see them and then they make it through the filter.

Very common practice dating back at least to 1998 when I started on eBay. Not sure how common the magnitude of this guys method is, but ebay would take action back in the day. Not sure about now as there are nearly 1.7 billion more listing than back then.

The one thing I have noticed when shopping for non baseball stuff is the huge increase of Chinese members doing the drop shipping thing. I recently had to order some motorcycle parts for a friend and all the parts shipped from the US but all the accounts are from China. This was even when I clicked on the US only option. I am guessing they get around that by having all their items shipped from the US.

I was out when they went from DOS to Windows...
.