I buy and sell stuff through Ebay fairly frequently and get the spoof and scams. I think I Ebay could fix this pretty easily by de-linking your email address from your Ebay account. The fact scammers can access your email address through your ebay account is inexcusable in today's world. All Ebay has to really do is make all contact between Ebay members go through Ebay's message system. No communication through email, no listing your email address in the messages, absolutely zero. Set up two inbox folders in the Ebay message system. One that ONLY ebay can send to so that official messages from them will be there. The other that ONLY members can use to contact you (i.e. questions about products, answers, etc.). The only email communication between members and Ebay are upon initial sign up and if initiated by the member. All other is handled on Ebay.

Again, this is an easy fix and an esay to implement compter chagne. The cost to Ebay would not be trivial, but it would fix the problem and go a long way to imporve their corporate reputation. They're starting to get a bad name in the industry as a heaven for scammers, con artists and cyber-thugs. The longer they do nothing to stop it, the more true the accusations start to seem.

Yes, I do stil buy and sell over Ebay and recently bought a new fly rod, but not as much as I used to. In fact, there was a rally nice looking rod the week before that I very much wanted to bid on, but the seller only had about 10 feedbacks and they were all over a year old and the guy was listing five or six very nice Winston and Sage rods brand new/unfished condition at a significant loss. When I asked, he said his dad owned a fly shop that went out of business and these came from the shop. Could be legit, could be items they were hiding from the bank, could be a scam and the rods didn't exist at all.

The moral is, if that guy was on the up and up, Ebay's reputation and lack of control over their community and the amount of outright fraud that is enabled by their site cost this poor fellow well over a thousand dollars in lost potential with these rods.

Jeff