Note to prevent e-auction fraud

Auction is a market mechanism by which a seller place an offer to sell an product and buyer made bid sequentially and competitively until a final price is reach. This is the traditional way to bid for a product, but for nowadays technology, auction can be done online that is E-auction. There are fews of popular e-auction around the world. For example is ebay and the most e-auction website for Malaysia is lelong.com.

Although it is convenient for consumer to bid online but there will have some fraud detected:

• Fake photo and misleading description.
• Bid shielding. Having fake bidders bid at a very high price then later pull out at the last minutes.
  
• Fake Escrow system.
• Shilling. Placing fake bids on auction items to artificially jack up the bidding price.

There are some notes for consumer to take notes that prevent from the e-auction fraud:

(a) User identity verification. For example phone number, driving license number and house address number. To verify the user identity, the voluntary program will encourage the user to supply some information for verification.

(b) Escrow services. Both buyer and seller in a deal are protected with an independent third party. Buyer mails the payment to escrow services which verify the payment and alert the seller when everything checks out.


(c) Feedback forum. It allow the buyer and seller to build up their online trading reputation. It provide users with ability to comment on their experience with other.