Massive Half.com Textbook Scams

[ddrueckhammer]

It appears that there is a massive amount of fraud happening on Half.com right now associated with textbook sales.

I recently purchased all of my textbooks for this Fall off of Half.com and only 2 out of 4 of them ever arrived. The sellers appear to be "no longer registered users" and do not respond to emails. When I bought my books, the users didn't have any negative feedback but within a few days they had received many negative comments before being banned (I assume).

Half.com requires that you wait for the estimated time for arrival to pass (which was about 20 days in my case). Only then can you contact the seller and you must wait 48 hours for the seller to respond before you can file a claim. Even worse, Claims supposedly take 30-60 days to be resolved. Furthermore, claimants are limited to 1 claim per month and 3 lifetime claims. This is all very frustrating because a few days after purchasing the items I noticed that the users were no longer registered.

I checked the Half.com/Ebay webforums and members had cataloged around 192 sellers that fit the above description in the last few days and there are probably many many more that are not being reported in the forums. While it is hard to quantify without inside information, it appears that these scams are on a massive scale and fraud has been commited on potentially tens of thousands of Half.com customers.

Half.com is not responsive to emails and I waited over 45 minutes on hold for customer service before I had to go. If any members of this board are members of the press you might want to take note of this as it could be a good story. There are already some universities warning their students to not use Half.com any longer. To other members, I would not recommend using Half.com to purchase textbooks until they change their buyer protection claim policies and institute some sort of safegaurds to prevent fraud and the sale of stolen merchandise on their site.

 

[XNine]

It appears that there is a massive amount of fraud happening on Half.com right now associated with textbook sales.

I recently purchased all of my textbooks for this Fall off of Half.com and only 2 out of 4 of them ever arrived. The sellers appear to be "no longer registered users" and do not respond to emails. When I bought my books, the users didn't have any negative feedback but within a few days they had received many negative comments before being banned (I assume).

Half.com requires that you wait for the estimated time for arrival to pass (which was about 20 days in my case). Only then can you contact the seller and you must wait 48 hours for the seller to respond before you can file a claim. Even worse, Claims supposedly take 30-60 days to be resolved. Furthermore, claimants are limited to 1 claim per month and 3 lifetime claims. This is all very frustrating because a few days after purchasing the items I noticed that the users were no longer registered.

I checked the Half.com/Ebay webforums and members had cataloged around 192 sellers that fit the above description in the last few days and there are probably many many more that are not being reported in the forums. While it is hard to quantify without inside information, it appears that these scams are on a massive scale and fraud has been commited on potentially tens of thousands of Half.com customers.

Half.com is not responsive to emails and I waited over 45 minutes on hold for customer service before I had to go. If any members of this board are members of the press you might want to take note of this as it could be a good story. There are already some universities warning their students to not use Half.com any longer. To other members, I would not recommend using Half.com to purchase textbooks until they change their buyer protection claim policies and institute some sort of safegaurds to prevent fraud and the sale of stolen merchandise on their site.

Go directly to your bank and dispute the charges with them. I did that with a credit company for payments they were withdrawing on top of the checks I was sending them, and my Bank resolved the issue in less than 5 hours.

Thanks for the warning. This is good to know...

 

[Sdashiki]

I like half.com, but when it comes to textbooks, gotta ebay it. Because there is just a quicker turn around for everything with alot more checks and balances than half.com alone.

half.com is eBay, but in a sad sad format and execution of the same idea.


the reason they make u wait so long with PayPal, eBay or Half.com is so they can still have your money and make some interest on it, before giving it back.

your $50 makes them $5....

 

[ddrueckhammer]

Go directly to your bank and dispute the charges with them. I did that with a credit company for payments they were withdrawing on top of the checks I was sending them, and my Bank resolved the issue in less than 5 hours.

Thanks for the warning. This is good to know...

This is probably my next move. They have a disclaimer on their help page not to dispute the charges or they won't help you but I don't think they can legally do that. I know corporations are trying to cover their a**es but this is unethical to the detriment of all of their users. Anyway, I just posted this to let others on here know about it. Hopefully, no Macrumors forum members will get scammed too.

 

[Mal]

I bought about 12 books from Half.com this semester for myself and my fiance, and no problems, but I'm very careful about ratings and stuff. I don't order from anyone that hasn't been around a while and sold a decent number of books.

jW

 

[ddrueckhammer]

I bought about 12 books from Half.com this semester for myself and my fiance, and no problems, but I'm very careful about ratings and stuff. I don't order from anyone that hasn't been around a while and sold a decent number of books.

jW

You are correct. This is partially my fault. Two of my sellers had been around for about 6 months with half a dozen positive ratings. Since they didn't have any negative ratings and they were the lowest prices I picked them. A week later they both had 10-15 negative ratings.

I'm glad you didn't have a problem but I do think that there is a higher magnitude of textbook scamming going on this semester. I actually wouldn't be surprised it it was a small ring and most of the scams are related. Linked below is a thread from the Ebay Trust and Safety board. It has 7 pages of people complaining and discussing the scams and there are many more threads like it. Like on Macrumors many times there are a few squeaky wheels that blow things out of proportion but if there were even 200 fraudulent sellers they could potentially defraud thousands of buyers. This is a real problem that needs to be addressed before it does major damage to Ebay/Half.com's reputation.

http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?threadID=2000220762&tstart=0&mod=1158871729190

I would say that if you do buy from Ebay then make sure that the seller has at least a 97% to 98% rating and have sold many items or been around a few years. Personally, I don't think I can support Ebay or Half anymore because they are just like all of the other corporations who don't take responsibility or try to assist users who have crimes commited against them.

My girlfriend's 17" Powerbook was stolen from our apartment a week ago and I wouldn't be surprised if it is/was sold on Ebay. Unfortunately, there is no way to track it as Ebay doesn't require that sellers disclose the serial number or provide any information besides a hotmail account to sell. Apple doesn't have any policy in place to help victimized customers either so I guess they are no different. In my opinion, it is unethical to ingnore or not assist in stopping criminal acts/recover stolen items that are commited on customers when they are brought to your attention. Unfortunately, the school of ethics I went to is much different than the one that the legal advisors for most corportations went to.