EBay to Digitally Verify New Sellers
Online auctioneer EBay Inc. will begin digitally confirming the identity of sellers this summer in an attempt to reduce fraudulent transactions.
The site, which auctioned off more than $11 billion of merchandise last year, will use authentication software designed by VeriSign Inc.
The process matches user information such as an address and telephone number against several national databases.
Only new sellers will be affected. Those already registered will not be required to reapply.
“We already have security measures in place,” said EBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove, who would not disclose how many of the site’s 46 million users are registered as sellers. “We’ve been asking sellers for pertinent information, including credit card numbers, for about two years.”
Even so, digital verification marks a sharp contrast to the time when EBay, founded in 1995, was considered a community that would self regulate by encouraging feedback on buyers and sellers.
“We are not a small city the size of Portland anymore,” Pursglove said. “Now we are the total of New York, London and Paris combined. When you get to those kind of numbers, you will see players who want to play outside the rules.”
Auctions are by far the largest source of fraud complaints from online users, according to the Internet Fraud Watch. About 70% of the complaints it received last year concerned online auctions.
“We believe that anything EBay does to try and combat fraud is great,” said spokeswoman Holly Anderson. “We just wish they would implement it for all their sellers. Those people who lost money last year are not going to feel so great knowing that these sellers are still out there and probably still scamming people.”
Pursglove said the rate of confirmed fraudulent transactions on EBay is about one-hundredth of 1%. “A lot of the fraud complaints we get turn out to be just a disagreement between a buyer and seller. It’s about whether an item is blue or turquoise,” he said.
The VeriSign process is automated and will take less time than EBay’s current verification regimen. “We have also added in data we got from EBay on people who in the past said they were someone they weren’t,” said John Weinschenk of VeriSign. “You never get fraud down to zero, but the aim is to take a major chunk out of it.”
