GETTING ATTENTION from EBAY
Wall Street Analysts who Cover eBay & Rate their Stock
Here's a list of addresses if you want to send an e-mail about eBay guaranteed to get attention.
Be positive. Make the company better.
Be factual. Tell them what happened. The explosion in
listings from one seller was suspicions and could have been detected.
Why can't eBay run the same fraud detection software that every credit card company in the country uses?
There is no real "community" in eBay, because eBay freezes
feedback, throttles
the messaging service among victims, and keeps fraud unsearchable and
hidden. There are a lot of burned customers out there like us.
Our disenchantment is a hang-over for the company. If we
every find a way to make our voice heard, it will not be good news for
the company.
More facts about eBay security below -- 2,000 employees working on "trust and safety", they say.
Bear, Sterns & Co.
Robert S. Peck, CFA
rpeck@bear.com
Victor B. Anthony
victor.anthony@bear.com
Kunal Madhukar, CFA
kmadhukar@bear.com
Lilian Y. Zhou
lzhou@bear.com
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Citigroup Global Markets Inc.
Mark Mahaney
mark.mahaney@citigroup.com
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Credit Suisse First Boston
Heath P. Terry, CFA
heath.terry@credit-suisse.com
Andrew Thomas
andrew.thomas@creditsuisse.com
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Deutsche Bank Company Research
Jeetil Patel, Research Analyst
jeetil.patel@db.com
Herman Leung, Research Associate
herman.leung@db.com
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Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co., Inc.
Shawn Milne
smilne@fbr.com
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Jefferies & Company, Inc.
Youssef H. Squali
ysquali@Jefferies.com
Hagit Reindel
hreindel@Jefferies.com
Naved Khan
nkhan@Jefferies.com
You might tell them you don't agree that Ebay is "lowering transaction
losses through sophisticated fraud prevention algorithms."
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J. P. Morgan Chase & Co.
Imran Khan
imran.t.khan@jpmorgan.com
Dana Maynard Gray
dana.m.gray@jpmorgan.com
Joseph Okleberry
joseph.n.okleberry@jpmorgan.com
Derrick Nueman
derrick.l.nueman@jpmchase.com
You are not happy to hear that it is common knowledge that " eBay does
not make it a practice to police its own website." It's not good
for eBay to brown off hundreds of customers at a time, many of them
making their first purchases on eBay.
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Prudential Equity Group, LLC
Mark J. Rowen
mark_rowen@prusec.com
Aimee Landwehr
aimee_landwehr@prusec.com
Anne S. Wickland
anne_wickland@prusec.com
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Stifel, Nicolaus & Company
Scott W. Devitt
swdevitt@stifel.com
Marla A. Block
mablock@stifel.com
Scott and Marla think eBay should be treated as a landlord of their
Website. Most complainers should deal with the merchant who
cheated them, not with eBay. Sure. But these analysts apparently
need to be told this is impossible after he skips town and eBay leaves
you with a dead phone number and a meaningless address.
Yes, we know that, of the 1.9+ billion listings on eBay in 2005, only a
fraction of 1% are fraudulent in nature. But has it happened to
you? The transactions that fail are a hardship and expensive
for everyone to fix. Expensive of time, expensive of effort, and
expensive of money lost.
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Susquehanna Financial group, LLLP
Marianne Wolk
Marianne.Wolk@sig.com
Roxane Previty
Roxane.Previty@sig.com
Malindi Davies
Malindi.Davies@sig.com
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UBS Securities LLC
Benjamin A. Schachter, Analyst
ben.schachter@ubs.com
MORE FACTS ABOUT eBAY's SECURITY PROGRAMS
Ebay claims to employ over 1,000 people to combat fraud, although many of them handle minor, endless credit card chargeback disputes.
Ebay says trust and safety between buyers and sellers is their high concern, and they have 2,000 employees
working on trust and safety "initiatives". Don't worry about
fraudulent auctions, they say, because eBay is keeping everything
under control with the PayPal Buyer Protection Program, the eBay
Standard Purchase Protection Program, and eBay's dispute resolution
processes.
Ebay tells investors to purchase their stock because "PayPal's technology provides superior privacy and fraud protection." Further, "sophisticated fraud prevention algorithms" lower the number of transactions that fail.
In fact, it is common knowledge that eBay does not make it a practice to police its own website.
Ebay has an enormous volume of data concerning both good and bad
transactions that the company has collected. It is a pity that
whatever technology they have developed to use all this data has not
done a good job of fraud detection for you and me.
Ebay would like to hear your suggestions for better security so that they can compete against Google's new & evolving Checkout service. They think PayPal already has a strong
record for fraud prevention. You beg to differ after what we have
all been through!
One year at eBay (2005):
$4.5 billion in sales
$1 billion in profits
1.9 billion listings
Ebay does not reveal the percentage of auctions that end in fraud or
dispute. Ebay is proud that their annual transaction loss rate
hovers around
0.3% -- typical for the industry. However, this is chiefly
the value
of compensation paid out and does not represent the value of the sales
that failed for buyers and sellers. 0.3% of $4.5 billion is
about $14 million in money and a lot more in effort that could be
expended on computer systems for detecting scammers before they strike
buyers. Detecting bad credit cards for sellers before they are
used is not the only problem here.
--jerry-va
Rev 30Jun06; 28Aug06
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