New eBay Security Measure Deemed Useless

eBay just came up with something new to protect their customers. To me, this measure does not mean too much, but that's just my opinion. You decide for yourself if it's any good. What they just did is increase buyer protection to £500. That would be nice if it were to protect you in any situation, but they have curbed this a bit. If you buy from a qualified seller (what most of us will call a "trusted user") and your product doesn't get where it's meant to, and also is worth less than £500 then you get your money back.

Now, what does eBay call a qualified seller? Well, it's a user that has at least 50 feedback points and that has a 98% positive feedback rating. That means that if it has 51 feedback points, out of which 2 are negative, then you won't get your money back. In any case, this is a great measure to make some users feel better protected while shopping online. This will mean that if something gets screwed up along the way, you won't lose your money, since it's not your fault. This only seems natural to me.

But I've said that this measure is pretty much useless, when talking about cyber-security. Why? Well, those people with those great ratings are serious about what they are doing and I doubt that they're going to fraud you. Scammers from eBay do not have these feedback points, so if you get scammed on eBay you won't get your money back. You won't get it anyway, if it's more than £500. And when's the last time you've heard of a cyber-crook scamming people for £20? It's all big sums on the web, these days.

So, yes, this is going to help people that are the "victims" of the transport process, but it isn't going to make much of a difference in scams, in my opinion.