• Welcome from Brian McGregor 
• Inspirational Quote of the Day
• News and Views
• How to Make Some Extra Money on Virtually Any eBay Auction
• Another Perspective on Safe Trading on eBay Auctions
• A Gift from Me to You
• Someone's auctioning what? Unusual items currently available
• Finally
• My Products Catalogue
• Back to Newsletter Archive

Hello and welcome.

And a special welcome to you if you're a new subscriber who has joined us in the last few days.

I have to admit I'm feeling pretty good at the moment. On Sunday my team, Newcastle United, beat the invincibles from Chelsea in the FA Cup.

I know Chelsea rested some of their superstars.

And I know that they played with 10 men for half the game.

And I know they played with 9 men for the last part of the match.

But hey!

How else do you expect Newcastle to beat Chelsea at the moment?

Knowing us, we'll go out in the next round anyway!

On the work front, it's been extremely hectic - but great fun. And, everything is under control. Honestly!

You see, I've always been thankful for a tip I uncovered when I was an executive in corporate Britain. And I'm going to give this tip to you. At no charge.

I read about an American business management guru who made an unusual proposition. He used to go to the CEO in companies across America and offer to give them a tip that they could immediately utilise in their daily working life. When asked how much his advice was going to cost, he would say, "Try this for a week, and then send me what you think it's been worth to you."

Everybody who implemented his tip sent the guru money. Some sent him thousands of dollars! Others, hundreds. The business management guru made a handsome living from ten minute meetings.

Well, that's all for this time.

What?

Oh yes. I almost forgot. The tip.

The tip is, before you go home from work each night you prepare a prioritised list of actions you will do tomorrow. Actually he expressed it slightly differently. He said they were not to allow themselves to go home until they had produced their list.

It doesn't sound very earth shattering does it? But it was very clever - in two ways.

First, it made the CEO produce the prioritised list when the background detail to these items were still fresh in the mind. Doing the list in the morning meant trying to think back into yesterday.

The second advantage was that the CEO could go home with a mind free of work matters, knowing that the important items were already safely listed on a pad on the desk. Compare this to going into work in the morning and sitting down to a blank piece of paper.

I've used this method myself for over 20 years. And working from home as I do, it's no different. I prepare my list when I leave my PC for the night.

Try it yourself.

And then you can send me thousands............

Good luck in all your eBay buying and eBay selling.

Speak to you again soon.

Brian
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1. Any Spare Cash for a Good Cause?

What are you doing on April 17th, 2005? You're not sure? Neither am I - there's nothing in my diary at the moment.

One of my readers, Tommy McLaughlin, knows exactly what his commitments are on that date!

Tommy is doing a sponsored abseil from the Forth Rail Bridge. He is raising money to buy Sensory Equipment for his chosen charity, Quarriers.

You can see the kind of work Quarriers do here.

If you'd like to help, read about Tommy's challenge.


2. Now, You Can't Lose Your Shirt!

A while ago I introduced you to a software product which enabled a PC user to connect to the internet at broadband speeds via their existing 56Kb modem.

It sounded unbelievable, but it works. I know, as I use it myself.

Many readers took up the software, and I've had excellent feedback from several about this unique and economic solution to getting broadband connection speed at 10% of broadband prices.

Now, the owners of the product are so confident of the speed gains users will enjoy that they have introduced a moneyback guarantee.

Today you can try the software for 14 days, and if you don't get the speeds promised you can have a full refund.

If you want to find out about this award winning software, you'll find more information here.


3. eBay and Safe Trading

The last couple of weeks has been a bumper period, if that's the right way to describe it, for readers contacting me about spams and scams in which they have been enmeshed.

Here are two of the stories I've received.

One shows how blatant people can be in stealing from eBay users. The other shows the lengths to which some will go to dupe honest eBayers.

First today, we have Conrad. Conrad bought a Freeview box on eBay and paid with PayPal. So far, so good.

However, the Freeview box was never delivered. After getting no joy from the seller, Conrad invoked PayPal's protection policy. He received the princely sum of 2p in recompense for this £44 transaction!

Conrad decided he would contact the police. By now he had also established that the same seller had recently sold a fancy bike wheel for £230 to an unsuspecting buyer. Again, the bike wheel was paid for, but never delivered.

Conrad emailed the Met Police. They told him he should contact his local police. The local police said they don't handle small online fraud, and gave him a police email address he should contact. He emailed the address. You've guessed it - it was the same department in the Met police he'd contacted in the first place!

Needless to say, Conrad isn't very complimentary about eBay, PayPal or the police!

The next transaction was sent in by Ben. This has some similarities with Conrad's case in that ordered items weren't delivered. Ben is more fortunate, however, in that he didn't part with any money. He realised he might be the subject of a fraud prior to making payment.

In this case, the seller was practicing a slightly more sophisticated fraud than Conrad's seller. This is how it worked.

The seller, who was based in Italy, emailed Ben that the goods would be delivered to the seller's local TNT depot. TNT would vouch by email to Ben that the goods were now in safe storage with them. At that point, Ben was to send payment by Western Union and inform TNT of the payment details. On receipt of payment details, TNT would release the goods from safe storage and deliver them to Ben. When Ben received the goods, he would email TNT to request they release payment details to the seller. The seller could then go and collect his money from Western Union.

Ben smelled a rat pretty early on. By now he had received an official looking email purporting to be from TNT Italy confirming that they now held some goods for him in safe storage.

He rang Western Union and they asked in which country this seller resides. Ben told them, and the Western Union lady said, "leave it, don't go near that with a barge pole. There are huge fraud problems in that country and believe me I spend most days talking to people that have gone further than you, and are trying to get their money back as no goods arrived. By all means call TNT but I think you'll find they are a delivery company and have nothing to do with holding money as a middle man or escrow service".

Ben decided to call TNT anyway. They confirmed that the "TNT email" was not from them, and no, they don't offer the kind of middleman services described by the seller.

If you want to avoid being a victim, all I can do is remind you to be highly vigilant. Also, you might want to review the checklist I gave you in this recent newsletter.

The keyword in the title above is “Virtually”. The technique I am about to describe works most of the time. However, you need to use a little imagination and invest some of your time.

If you get it working, you will set up a useful income stream over and above whatever you earn from your successful auctions.

The only requirement that is essential for this to work is that you should be selling regularly into the same niche market. It isn’t really viable if your eBay activity consists of selling via different categories each week.

So, what’s the technique?

An example is probably the best way to describe this idea.

Let’s suppose you’re selling garden furniture. You sell garden furniture which you get at a good price from a local manufacturer. An auction closes and you send an email to the winning bidder or Buy it Now buyer with payment and shipping information.

The last paragraph of the email says, "With your beautiful new garden furniture in place, I wondered if you would you be interested in my new ebook, “BBQ Magic”? It will show you how to turn your next barbecue into a feast fit for royalty. You can read about it by Clicking Here."

(The "clicking here" would be a hyperlink to your web page or eBay store where you have your sales copy about the ebook)

The ebook is a 15 to 25 page PDF file of techniques about barbecues. If you don’t know much about barbecues, just get onto Google and search for “barbecues free ebook”. Or, if you prefer, go to the local library and read up on the topic. If you don’t know what PDF files are, again a quick search on Google will give you the background you need.

Now, you’re not allowed to copy the copyrighted materials of others. You just learn enough from others to be able to write about barbecues in your own words and style. If you really don't have any writing ability, find someone who does. This would make a great project for a teenager or a student.

You can price your ebook at whatever you wish. As you deliver it as a computer file, your cost of production is zero.

This idea gets better, however. You can also offer your ebook to losing bidders on your auctions. Send them an email saying you’re sorry they weren’t successful. Tell them (if you are) you’re putting up a new auction for similar or identical garden furniture. And tell them about your ebook at the same time. After all, you already know they’re interested in sitting in their gardens.

Plus, there’s also a way in which you can make your ebook available to people who read your auction but who don’t even bid.

As a seller, you can create an About Me Page on eBay. This is the one place where eBay allows you to provide a link to a non-eBay web page. In this instance, that web page would contain the sales copy for your barbecue ebook.

Within your auction description, you simply place a paragraph that says: "Please visit my About Me Page to see some Barbecue Magic". Make the words "About Me Page" a hyperlink to your About Me page.

If you don't have a web site, you could create an eBay Shop from which you sell your ebook.

In fact, you can also sell your ebook via eBay auctions. In this example, you would create an auction describing the ebook. You could list it in Non-Fiction Books and in the Barbecue category of Home and Garden.

It really doesn't matter what item you sell on eBay, there will always be the potential for an information product that relates to your item. Your imagination will help you to think up a connection. For example;

If you sell dog-related items, think about dog training or dog health.
If you sell Afghan rugs, think about specialised rug cleaning or repairing rugs.
If you sell oil paintings, think about caring for oil paintings.

And so it goes on. Your mind will come up with several ideas with a small amount of brainstorming.

Trust me.

I’m from head office, and I’m here to help you….

Ooops. Sorry. That’s a different article!

This is an article I read which I thought would be useful education for us all. It concerns the growth of internet fraud, including the impact on eBay members.

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"As online auctions explode in popularity, more crooks are muscling in on the territory.

Complaints about Internet auctions were the fastest-growing category in an annual Federal Trade Commission report on fraud recently released. They almost doubled to 98,650 in 2004, up from 51,000 in 2002, and accounted for 16 percent of all complaints.

The total number of complaints about Internet-related crimes - including fraudulent auctions, Internet services and scams in which the consumer was contacted or responded via the Internet - was 205,568. The crimes cost consumers $265 million, with a median loss of $214, the FTC said.

Identity theft - through credit card, bank and phone fraud - continued to be the largest source of complaints. The FTC said 246,570 people reported that they were victimized, up from 161,890 in 2002.

Overall, consumers reported losing more than half a billion dollars to fraud last year, the FTC said. The agency received 635,173 complaints, up 57 percent from 403,688 in 2002.

"There's a certain percentage of our population that are con artists and scammers, let's say it's about 3 percent,'' said Rosalinda Baldwin, CEO of TheAuctionGuild.com, an upstate New York site that acts as a watchdog and information provider for online auction users. "As those people get more Net savvy, their business in the analog world is just going to move online."

"It is a wise move for a person who is thinking about transacting business online to become educated," said David Steiner, president of AuctionBytes.com in Massachusetts. "It's not an innocent little playground anymore."

Some online auction fans have gone even further. Frustrated that auction leader eBay, as they see it, isn't sufficiently proactive about hunting down con artists, they've taken matters into their own hands.

Self-styled auction vigilantes try to combat online scammers by giving them a taste of their own medicine. Some submit false bids to sellers they believe are crooks, including sending fake Western Union receipts to trick the seller into thinking they've landed a sale.

"We bait (scammers). We waste their time," said Keith, the moderator of a site called TheScamBaiter.com. He declined to give his last name for fear of reprisals from scammers.

"This weekend, a friend and I 'bought' 30 or 40 Super Bowl tickets from Romanian scammers," he said. "If we get four or five people baiting a single scammer, he has his hands full. He thinks he's going to get all this money."

Keith said he spends a couple of hours a day "baiting" auction scammers, fitting it in around his job as a Virginia building contractor.

"We've done a lot more damage to the scammers than eBay has ever done. We have it down to a science, where we're really confident whoever we're going after is a fraudulent seller," he said.

Keith said scam baiters also launch "denial of service" attacks, in which hundreds of computers flood fraudulent sites with messages, effectively shutting them down.

The baiters have an unusual way to measure success.

"We also try to get death threats from (scammers)," Keith said. "Among scam baiters, a death threat is considered a trophy. That means you're doing your job, you really p****d them off."

EBay spokesman Hani Durzy said the company does not condone such practices.

"We believe there is a very clear line between community activism and vigilantism," he said. "Anybody who takes what we consider to be un-eBay like actions against other users because of an assertion they have, we request our community refrain from doing that."

Only a small fraction of 1 percent of eBay listings is confirmed to be fraudulent, Durzy said. Last year the company hosted 1.4 billion listings, including both auction and fixed-price items.

"In the grand scheme of things, it's a very rare occurrence on eBay," he said. "Fraud is not completely eliminated on eBay nor on any other open, transparent market."

Some eBay watchers say the company does all it can to downplay fraud complaints because it doesn't want to scare customers away.

"EBay is horrible," said Baldwin of TheAuctionGuild.com. "If you report too many scam sellers on the site, if eBay does anything about them, it's a miracle. And if you get too vocal about it, especially if you talk to a reporter, eBay suspends you. That's crazy. They don't want people hearing about fraud."

EBay said it takes complaints seriously.

"We look at every fraud report that comes into us," Durzy said. "We rely on the community to alert us to instances where they feel they have been wronged."

Durzy said eBay has more than 1,000 people on its "trust and safety team," which includes engineers, code writers, analysts and fraud investigators. The company does not break out the number of fraud investigators.
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Hopefully, we all know to be vigilant in our eBay trading. We're all dealing with strangers who we would love trust. The reality is, however, eBay is attracting a growing number of scammers, spoofers and fraudsters. So, be careful!

If you are concerned about identity theft, you can try a service from Experian free. They will first of all provide you with a full credit report. And then they give you 30 days to test out the complete Experian service.

Part of their service is that they alert you to key changes on your record. This gives you early detection of potential identity fraud activity on your accounts.

For full information of this free offer, click here.

This time we have a software program which resolves a problem which can arise when Service Pack 2 is installed to a PC running Windows XP.

For many users, an unwelcome feature of implementing Service Pack 2 is that it renders some ebooks unworkable.

The software I'm giving you gets over this instantly. It's called FixMyEbooks. And this is how you use it:

1. When you want to open an ebook, open FixMyEbooks first.
2. Minimise FixMyEbooks.
3. Open and read your ebook.
4. When you're finished, close the ebook.
5. Close FixMyEbooks

To download FixMyEbooks, click here.

Nothing surprises me when it comes to internet auctions. Amuse yourself with some of these beauties.

I guess you could say this auction is time limited.

Can you suggest the items you're bidding for here? I'm lost...

It's the use of the term "beginners" which intrigued me!

What is this please? And why £3.45 P&P?

Spooky, or what?

Disclaimer - I have no association with any of the sellers of the above items.