We saw this with the Xbox360 and it's only going to be worse with the Playstation 3. Remember all those scams on eBay last year? A few people were selling just their Xbox360 box so they had a photo of just the box and people were bidding 600, 700 bucks for it. Some clown had a brown cardboard box and with marker drew an X on it and put it up online as an X box and it drew a stupid amount of money in bidding frenzy.
Well... eBay feels your pain and has put rules in place well in advance to stop some of the insanity. Effective immediately eBay has set in place the following rules for Playstation 3 and Wii auctions:
- Only one of each console can be listed per seller at a time prior to the system launch dates.
- The seller must only accept PayPal payments and have a minimum of 50 feedback and a rating of 98% or higher to qualify for PayPal Buyer Protection.
- The pre-sale can only be in Auction format, no Buy It Now listings will be accepted
- The listing must include a clear photo of the pre-order receipt in the description of your auction
That all sounds like a pretty good step forward. Except I'm a bit suspicious on the PayPal thing. eBay stands to make a lot of money double dipping fees because they make money on the auction closing amount as well as they make 3% basically on the PayPal transaction. It does however help prevent wire and check fraud.
