Wow! I cannot believe how evasive eBay's responses were, this is such a common issue you would think they could give you a definitive answer. Great investigating Ben!

In the old dad days, you saw an ad in the local rag, went around to meet the fella, kicked the tires, quick wizz around the block and put down an honest deposit. When gentleman’s agreements meant something. I never got scammed in the 80s !

Great Video!

It’s honestly outrageous how people can even think about doing this also quite bad from eBay obtaining the money from the scanners. Outrageous

Poor customer service from eBay. They don't really care about us genuine buyers/sellers. Perhaps everyone should stop buying and selling on eBay until they get their act together.

Great video. Thanks for sharing this story. EBay is shady af, I’ve never bought something on their site and I’m planning to keep it that way.

Had this happen to me with my RS4…

This is a great piece of work Ben! Love the way you've gone about the investigation! And thank you for sharing this with everyone so they can keep an eye out for copy paste scam ads when they list their cars legitimately.

I think that this is happening across all classified ads on eBay, scammers gathering contact details to sell on it would guess at? I reported it but bother appears to be done about them.

I remember years ago trying to buy a campervan on ebay - a sizeable percentage of the adverts were scams with all sorts of excuses why you couldn't see the vehicle in person before buying. Ebay did bugger all about the ads that I reported to them.

Excellent content Ben,

Makes me think of the old saying crime doesn't pay but it seems more like yes it does.

I think its rife amongst these massive tech companies. Facebook marketplace is brimming with car scammers, And KZfaq aren't doing much either to combat the grifters making a fortune out of creators by ripping off copyrighted material.. I've had first hand experience with someone stealing my content and KZfaq were opaque to say the least.. Computer says no. Well done for shedding light on this.

Hi Ben hope your doing good.

It appears to me that EBay don’t have a robust policy to deal with this specific type of fraudulent activity. If they did, they would have quoted it to you Ben. This reminds me of the many issues with other foreign owned platforms, such as Facebook etc.. These grow beyond their humble beginnings, but do not develop robust enough policies to deal with unsavoury behaviour. I guarantee that EBay will hide behind American law and have not fully risk assessed or understood the law in all of the markets it sells in. This is just my opinion, but it is a fact that many corporations will not allow business dealings through EBay, as they do not meet many GDPR policies in the UK. My suggestion to EBay would be to develop a robust UK policy in conjunction with a legal team to sort this and boost their reputation, but also increase genuine ’business to business’ transactions.

Interesting vid! Never knew this was a thing on eBay. Side note, wow that white gran sport interior is an incredible spot to film!

Ben you have the patience of a Saint. You should have just started "Hi Im Ben and Im a journalist!" Bet you would have been transferred to a very specialist team 😂

Are the banks complicit too? If you could provide the bank with the scammer's details could they not involve the police?

Great video Ben. Couple of thoughts. Firsty, I wonder who owns the intellectual property on your car advert in this situation? Is it still yours, or does it belong to Autotrader? Not sure if it makes any difference, but I wonder whether it would be worth contacting Autotrader to ask whether there's any pressure they can exert regarding the stolen ad - after all, this isn't great for their business either. And eBay shouldn't be profiting from crime, but neither should the scammers be refunded. Ideally eBay would change their terms to state that any listing fees for removed ads would be retained and donated to charity. It's sad how many firms are unable/unwilling to accept responsibility. Maybe you could raise a grumpy dads campaign group? 😉