The world of online auctions is becoming as notorious as the Wild West. Unscrupulous thieves con innocent buyers and the authorities seem powerless to intervene. Fraudtracking.com, a campaigning website, estimates that British customers are losing £500,000 a day through fraudulent transactions on the various auction sites, but there were just 70 convictions for online auction fraud last year. However, there’s a new posse in town, a group of UK cyber-vigilantes intent on running the internet auction cowboys out of town. Full story

AUCTION website eBay is to launch a training course for the Met to teach officers to spot online fraud. The site plans to train 22 officers on how the site works, and what precautions are in place to protect consumers. It will also teach them how to search profiles and analyse trading histories to spot potential fraudsters. There have already been trials of the scheme elsewhere in , with more than 2,000 officers trained. Full story

eBay fined £31m over sales of fake luxury goods
In a potentially landmark judgment, the auction website eBay was found guilty by a French court yesterday of failing to prevent the sale of fake luxury goods on the internet. The internet site, which described the ruling as "indecent", was ordered to pay almost €40m (£31.6m) in damages to the French luxury goods conglomerate LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy). The California-based auction company was also ordered to cease all its sales of LVMH perfumes, whether genuine or fake. Full story

Today without warning Paypal "closed" my account with $5,772.91 dollars in it. They say on the website and in several calls I made to them that they will not release the money due to a routine credit scan they made and didn't like what they read in my equifax credit report. What closed means by their definition is I can't take the money out and I earn no interest on the money for 6 months. Almost 2 months have gone by since this happened and this is still the situation. They say when I signed up for Paypal I signed a standard agreement that says they can freeze the money in my account any time they want to. Full story

Do not think you are safe when a seller has 100% Feedback this means nothing as I found out- eBay feedback system is now a totally unacceptable method to a paying customer of judging a seller. You really need to be very careful buying on eBay it is not as safe as you think it is no matter how eBay make advertising loom on TV. Latest news!! Mr Andrew Cuthbertson has been arrested and best of all has been remanded in custody. I have received confirmation from South Wales Police and Mr Cuthbertson had more than two we were aware of he is believed to have 7 accounts on eBay. Full story

Jennings reported the site to eBay on Nov. 25, and four days later he got a note back from the company's investigations team claiming that the e-mail message was, in fact, "an official e-mail message sent to you on behalf of e-Bay."

Jennings was dumbfounded. He immediately wrote back to eBay pointing out that the Web site being used was clearly fraudulent, but his e-mail went unanswered.

On Monday, an eBay spokeswoman confirmed that the e-mail message was indeed part of a fraud, but she could not explain why it had initially been identified as legitimate. "I don't know the answer to that," said spokeswoman Amanda Pires. "I'm assuming right now it was just an error."

From their initial response, it appeared that eBay's investigators did not take his concerns seriously, Jennings said. "They never actually used the word idiot, but I felt like they were calling me an idiot," he said. He believes that the e-mail message in question bore such a close resemblance to a legitimate eBay message that the company's investigators were simply tricked by the scam.

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