High eBay Feedback is No Guarantee of Integrity or Honesty
When we wrote this page, this eBay member's feedback was 0 according to eBay.
eBay Copyright Thieves
Many eBay vendors use our coin photographs to sell inferior quality coins on eBay. These eBay members are dishonest and should be avoided.
We believe eBay profits from IP rights infringements (copyright theft), and does so knowingly, only removing infringing items reluctantly, if at all.
Sample Listing
100gram (sic) gold bar
for sale i have 100gram gold bar 999.99 (sic) pure gold kept it to invest it but i have recently lost my job so forced to sell starting bid 99p no reserve happy bidding and good luck have any questions email me
What's Wrong?
We invest a great deal of time, effort, and cost into creating some of the best photographic coin images on the internet. We strongly object when lazy and dishonest people decide to use them without a by your leave or thanks, doing so in competition with us.
Copyright theft is dishonest. We recommend you avoid doing business with dishonest dealers.
This particular eBay seller not only stole our high quality images of our Our 100 Gram Credit Suisse Gold Bar Photograph, he used it to sell his own coins on eBay. He did not mention to potential buyers that the high quality photographs of a mint condition coin was not his own photograph.
It's possible he is ignorant of such fine points, or just plain ignorant.
It is always possible, even likely, that sellers who steal photographs do not own a similar item, and have the intention to totally defraud potential buyers.
The vendor is not only cheating us by stealing our copyright images, he is fraudulently or ignorantly misleading and deceiving all potential buyers. Gaining pecuniary advantage by deception is the definition of fraud.
The image 20midge08 used was one of our older ones, we have since upgraded the photographs on our Credit Suisse Gold Bars
page.
Price
The seller was asking a starting price of £0.99.We suspect they (there are two identical listings) are stolen or non-existent. Are we getting cynical?
Both lots sold, with 7 and 9 different bidders. One sold at about 4% discount to gold, the other almost 10% discount, both a bargain if they were genuine, but remember the old advice about being too good to be true!
Stupid or Crooked?
If 20midge08 had posted his gold bar to us, we would have been happy to buy it.Selling it through eBay, he will have had to pay eBay a selling fee which is a commission of 10%. If the buyer paid him through PayPal, he will also have had PayPal commission to pay (between 2.9% and 4.9%), so he would receive less than selling direct to us.
eBay is full of sellers stupid enough to think that they will get the best price selling by auction on eBay, often they are wrong because they have not checked market prices (perhaps 20midge08 tried to sell them to a local gold buyer and was only offered scrap gold. If he managed to find the photos on our websites, it would have been simple for him to pick up the telephone and ask what we were paying. The only downside for his is that we would expect his to pay the postage to us. The advantage to his would be getting more than using eBay, not having to create the listing, and getting paid more quickly.,
eBay Guilty of Negligence or Complicity
We will be reporting this example of copyright abuse using our standard Statutory Declaration via the eBay VeRO programme, and wait to see if they chose to action or ignore our report. We look forward to taking legal action against eBay for their negligence and / or complicity if they fail to take down the offending material promptly.
Copyright Notice Please see our "Copyright" page for further information.
Buying Gold Coins & Bars on eBay
Selling Gold Coins & Bars on eBay
Copyright Thieves on eBay We already have a page naming and shaming dealers using our images without permission. It's time we did the same for eBay, although if we include them all, this could be a very long page.
Alphabetical Listing of Other Copyright Theft Sites
Other Web Sites All comments about copyright also cover content of all our other websites including, but not limited to:-
Our Images
Our 100 Gram Credit Suisse Gold Bar Photograph