The eBay vendor had a glowing record — more than 900 successful sales, with only a single complaint amid a long series of positive testimonials from customers. So when a Georgia bidder won the seller's auction for an Olympus digital camera in January, there seemed little reason to worry about dispatching almost $700 into cyberspace.
But the camera never arrived.
"I don't think I will ever buy anything over the Internet again," the conned bidder lamented in a posting on an eBay discussion board.
Ever since the early days of the Internet, Web sites have struggled to find ways of reassuring users that a stranger could be as honest and knowledgeable as a local merchant. With Internet commerce now estimated to exceed $100 billion a year, Web sites are crafting more elaborate rating and feedback systems — reputation monitors of sorts.
But the cheats also have noticed the unprecedented chance for ill-gotten gains, and Web sites must spend more time and money to secure their systems.
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EBay established its position as the Web's premier auctioneer in part by pioneering a system to allow users to rate each other and comment on the quality of their transactions.
But users have repeatedly found ways to inflate or wholly fabricate their reputations. At Amazon, a computer glitch three years ago inadvertently exposed the real names of reviewers writing under pseudonyms. Some turned out not to be disinterested literary judges but authors giving their own books glowing reviews to boost sales.
The scams take countless and ever more ingenious forms. These include intimidating other users who give negative ratings by threatening to retaliate with negative feedback of their own. Some con artists also create false secondary accounts that a cheat can use to give himself fake positive feedback.
It also includes piling up legitimate positive reviews and then closing in for the kill as an eBay seller from New Jersey called "malkilots" did to nearly three dozen would-be camera buyers, including the bidder from Georgia.
The incentive to inflate one's reputation is powerful even for vendors who do not plan to turn on their buyers. Academic studies have shown that eBay vendors with good feedback ratings can sell their wares faster and charge more for them.
To counter the threat of users manipulating their reputations, Web sites can deploy complex algorithms to detect fraud, for instance by checking whether patterns of mutual admiration seem to originate from the same computer, or make it difficult or expensive for users to create multiple accounts.
