Another eBay seller caught selling misappropriated goods. The scam was being run by Thong Quoc Tran, 30 of Placentia, CA and involved his having allegedly filing more than 1,000 phony warranty claims on Cisco routers. According to the affidavit, Tran would obtain the serial numbers of routers legally purchased from Cisco by companies around the country. Tran would then buy warranties on those routers, claim they were broken, get Cisco to send him replacement parts to repair them and then resell the replacement parts sent by Cisco at a discount on eBay.

eBay just cannot stay out of the lime light, for all the wrong reasons. Ken Walton, an art forger and crook, together with a few friends, managed to bilk eBay users out of millions by selling forged art work. He also helped his auctions along by engaging in shill bidding. He was eventually found out, tried, convicted and sentenced to nine months of probation. Hey, whoever said crime doesn’t pay surely never knew about eBay! eBay probably thought that the extremely negative publicity would have gone away with the end of this case.

But Ken had no plans of letting eBay off that easy. In 2006, he released his book entitled: “Fake: Forgery, Lies & eBay” to remind the world again that you have a good chance of getting taken advantage of on eBay. And in July, he spoke at the 2007 International Appraisers Conference, his talk being called “Fakes, Lies and eBay: Confessions of an Art Forger.” But the publicity eBay has endured to date may be just a small sample of what is to come.

According to AuctionBytes, Ken stated recently that in June he sold the film rights to his book to a Los Angles-based producer. A movie about the ripoffs buyers can suffer from while shopping on eBay would be quite entertaining, to say the least.