SHILL FEEDBACK

I'm not sure about other luxury goods, but at least with Dupont lighters counterfeiters have started using shill feedback. How it seems to work is this: They have numerous eBay accounts (or it could be friends / "teammates"), and they come up with a 100% positive feedback rating. Granted, these people usually only have a feedback score of around 10 or so, but to an eBay newbie, or someone who is really naive and doesn't read the feedback comments, this could be very misleading. I found out about it by accident myself. I noticed a TON of counterfeit S.T. Dupont lighters. I noticed that almost always these sellers had a user name that consisted of a combination of seemingly random letters (and sometimes a few numbers in there). I noticed also that usually their feedback score was around 10 or 11, and that the users leaving the feedback had user names suspiciously close to those of the seller... usually that same combination of random letters and numbers. I decided to check the comments and came to find out that these so-called positive comments consisted of nonsensical fractions of sentences, sometimes actually kind of amusing (!). I have reported this to eBay, but nothing has been done so far. Anyway, just thought I'd report on this new trend of "Shill Feedback".

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