Small Traditions LLC/SCANDAL UPDATE

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by carlsonjok

Because it is a nonsensical point.

You know who also doesn't have access to eBay's databases? Everyone else. Including laymen who can, based on publicly available information, easily point to circumstances that strongly indicate illegitimate (and likely illegal) bidding behavior. And guess what? While those laymen only have access to anonymized bidder IDs, PWCC has access to the full bidder ID. And, if PWCC is as important to eBay as you like to tell us ad nauseum that they are, then they are one phone call away from knowing the bidders name and address that can be checked against the consigner's.

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

As I've pointed out many times when I see idiocy like PWCC can't possibly monitor its own business, it takes a few minutes at most to sort your auctions by highest bid price and look through a given number for unusual activity.

Clearly, you guys don't understand the scale of what you are asking them to do or what it would take for them to "monitor their business" as you put it.

It's one thing to have an entire internet forum of free crowd-sourced resources with endless time on their hands and nothing better to do than clicking through random eBay listings in an effort to find someone who *might* be shill bidding their auctions. But it's something else entirely for a consignment company to be expected to hire a team to crawl through over 10,000 listings per week, mapping out eBay user IDs and cross-checking them to see which users might be shilling their consignments. This is an absolutely ridiculous expectation. Do you have any idea how much this would cost? Do you know how much it would cost just to set up and maintain a database alone to handle this, let alone the manpower? They've sold well in excess of a million eBay listings lol. Perhaps you don't realize that clicking on a 'bid history' link that shows eBay user IDs is not "access to the data". There's a huge difference between clicking links and seeing names and having the access to the data required to monitor something like this at scale and to be able to write code that enables you to intervene when necessary. When I say "they don't have access to the data", clearly this point has not landed with you guys. You clearly are not data people. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about here. You couldn't possibly have ever spent a day in your life in the tech industry if you actually expect them to do this. Meanwhile, this is an easy problem for eBay to solve. They already have the database set up with all the relevant data at their fingertips and the resources (data analysts & data scientists) to do it, not to mention the responsibility to do this. And let's not forget, they also already claim to do this on their website (even though they clearly do a shit job of it).

I have personally written fraud detection algorithms and have coded out large-scale projects just like this for my previous employer (a large insurance company). I know what it would take to accomplish what you guys are proposing. This is a huge undertaking. It's not just asking Billy and Sally to spot-check a few listings over their lunch break.

[carlsonjok]

Originally Posted by Snowman

Clearly, you guys don't understand the scale of what you are asking them to do or what it would take for them to "monitor their business" as you put it.

Actually, we do. It is called internal auditing and virtually all major corporations have a department dedicated to it.

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by carlsonjok

Actually, we do. It is called internal auditing and virtually all major corporations have a department dedicated to it.

But PWCC is sooooooooooooooo huge and vast and sprawling they couldn't possibly do it.

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

But PWCC is sooooooooooooooo huge and vast and sprawling they couldn't possibly do it.

I just double-checked for you. Looks like they still don't have access to the data behind the listings!.

Your proposal to sort through the top 10-20 listings does nothing to solve this problem. That's 10 grains of sand on an entire beach. And they already ban those users if they don't pay or if they bid from their known eBay accounts. You don't know what you're talking about here.

[Peter_Spaeth]

Actually it's not 20 grains of sand at all, because the bigger cards are where most of the problems were. But you seem incapable of understanding that. Also with all PWCC's employees they could have sorted through many more than 20 without much of a time commitment.

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

Actually it's not 20 grains of sand at all, because the bigger cards are where most of the problems were. But you seem incapable of understanding that. Also with all PWCC's employees they could have sorted through many more than 20 without much of a time commitment.

They've sold millions of cards Peter.

Oh, and in case you've somehow forgotten. They still don't have access to the data behind the listings!

[drcy]

Snowman is an army of one in these debates. I think people give him (and his contrarianism) too much oxygen.

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by drcy

Snowman is an army of one in these debates. I think people give him (and his contrarianism) too much oxygen.

I plead guilty to that. DNFTT as they say.

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by drcy

Snowman is an army of one in these debates. I think people give him (and his contrarianism) too much oxygen.

This is certainly true. And yet for some reason, I can't seem to stop outputting the CO2.

[carlsonjok]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

But PWCC is sooooooooooooooo huge and vast and sprawling they couldn't possibly do it.

Originally Posted by Snowman

I just double-checked for you. Looks like they still don't have access to the data behind the listings!.

Your proposal to sort through the top 10-20 listings does nothing to solve this problem. That's 10 grains of sand on an entire beach. And they already ban those users if they don't pay or if they bid from their known eBay accounts. You don't know what you're talking about here.

Let me help you out a bit here. There is more (way more) to the functioning of a company than database analyses and program algorithms. I have no doubt that you can speak authoritatively on those topics. But, you need to understand that even a marginally competent accountant can suss out anomalous transactions in their sleep. Anyone with advanced training in corporate auditing would be all over it like a hobo on a ham sandwich. The fact that you cannot grok this isn't the proof that you think it is. It isn't proof at all.

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by carlsonjok

Let me help you out a bit here. There is more (way more) to the functioning of a company than database analyses and program algorithms. I have no doubt that you can speak authoritatively on those topics. But, you need to understand that even a marginally competent accountant can suss out anomalous transactions in their sleep. Anyone with advanced training in corporate auditing would be all over it like a hobo on a ham sandwich. The fact that you cannot grok this isn't the proof that you think it is. It isn't proof at all.

Again, I completely agree. Anyone with training in auditing (or even my 10 year old nephew with a few hours of training) could suss out anomalous eBay transactions.

I'm arguing that you don't understand the scope of this problem and the manpower and skills it would take to solve it at a scale that would yield the end results we all want. I'm saying the solutions you guys are proposing are insufficient. Even if PWCC spent tens of thousands of man-hours going through their listings one-by-one and added all suspicious bidders to their blocked bidders list they still wouldn't solve the problem. Most would just bid from a different account the following day. But even if that all did work, they still wouldn't be able to block the vast majority anyhow as they'd still be limited to blocking a mere 5,000 users as discussed previously (which is a small fraction of the number they'd need to block).

[carlsonjok]

Originally Posted by Snowman

Again, I completely agree. Anyone with training in auditing (or even my 10 year old nephew with a few hours of training) could suss out anomalous eBay transactions.

I'm arguing that you don't understand the scope of this problem and the manpower and skills it would take to solve it at a scale that would yield the end results we all want.

I understand that is what your argument is. But, again, it is nonsensical. You don't need to inspect every transaction. Auditing shares a simple concept with quality control and a number of other business functions: sampling plans. You will end up finding suspicious transactions, and to reuse the simile, those transactions are a loose thread to be pulled.

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by carlsonjok

Actually, we do. It is called internal auditing and virtually all major corporations have a department dedicated to it.

I guess I'll just keep repeating myself then.

They don't have access to the data behind the listings! Only eBay does. This is eBay's problem to solve. Not theirs.