Susan Grant, an Internet fraud specialist at the National Consumers League in Washington DC says her non-profit organization gets 600 Internet fraud complaints a month. Since, two thirds of these complaints involve online auctions, this is an important topic for Internet ScamBusters. According to Margaret Whitman, CEO of eBay, only 27 auctions per million generate a fraud complaint to her company. Naturally, eBay wants to drive that number down as low as possible. Until now, the primary way of gauging a buyer or seller's reliability on eBay has been the feedback from other members.
Members can submit evaluations about one another, which are labeled as positive or negative.
They are then tallied to generate a score for each member. Ratings of plus 10 or better are rewarded with a star. People who get scores of minus four or worse are evicted from eBay. According to the WSJ, the feedback system at eBay has at times been strained. Some users have pumped up their scores by getting friends to submit positive feedback, even though they haven't actually done business together on eBay.