Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
We’ve never tried AirBnB but I’ve been checking it out for those few nights where we just need a 1 night stay here and there along the way. There is a surprising number of boats available on AirBnB. Interesting but not sure I’m ready for my first AirBnB experience to be on a boat. I also found a couple who has a pool house with several vintage airstream trailers in the the backyard available. If we end up in that area I might have to talk my husband into staying in a vintage airstream for a night.
The definition of money laundering is the process of disguising money gained from illicit means (crimes) and moving it through a series of transactions to make it look like the money was gained from legitimate legal means (i.e. the money is “clean”). The goal is to get the dirty money into the legal financial system without detection. Money laundering can get very complicated and involve many layers that are difficult to peel away. It’s also expensive. The simpler the money laundering scheme, usually the easier it is to detect. Here is a very basic watered down example:
1. Every month I need to send $$ to a cartel in a foreign country (for drugs, human trafficking, hush money, blackmail, etc.). Mailing a check won’t work because any person or business associated with that cartel is going be flagged by every bank that would process such a check and will report the transaction to government via a Suspicious Activity Report. Sending a large amount of money in cash is risky as it could get stolen or if discovered by the postal service (they do have means to do this), I could be arrested for transporting over $10K over the border unless I first reported it to the IRS on a CMIR form (a form which is tracked and monitored by all kinds of law enforcement agencies so as a criminal I really don’t want there to be an official paper record of it). Sending a wire won’t work because all wires go through the U.S. financial system via a bank, Western Union, Ria, Moneygram, etc. all of which have laws that require they have programs in place to identify and report suspicious activity to the government. So instead, the cartel has a number of people working for them that I can send money to via various methods. Some of these people “sell” items online. I buy a crappy book for $1,000. The book is really worth $10 (this is an obvious example – the good money launderers would not be this obvious). The seller may or may not send the book to me, it doesn’t matter. What matters is I just transferred $1,000 to the cartel’s people. To keep the money laundering from being obvious, a technique called “smurfing” is used which means a large number of people (think of all those Smurfs!) will launder small dollar amounts in order to stay under the radar of financial institutions and law enforcement. There could dozens or hundreds of these money laundering smurfs (all with multiple identifies) buying and selling items for more than the item’s value in order to get the money from me to the foreign cartel. Ebay does not have a requirement to monitor and report suspicious activity, but Paypal does. They have to have sophisticated systems in place to monitor transactions in order to try to identify what is suspicious and what isn’t. When you think of the millions of transactions that flow through the world every single day, you can imagine how large a task it is.My best sale this week was a higher end make up case that sold for $200. I bought it for $69 brand new. I’ve had 3 of them for probably a year and was beginning to think my purchase had been a mistake. After having them listed at $249 with a lot of watchers for quite some time, I finally sold one when I reduced the price last week. I’m now waiting for the buyer to hopefully leave good feedback so that I can be somewhat confident that they probably aren’t going to return it. Profit after all fees and shipping was $88. It was a lot of money to have tied up for that long so I don’t know if I’ll do it again.
An online retail arbitrage purchase thats had some selling activity lately was 20 headbands I bought during a Black Friday sale. After a few months of no activity, they’ve been a consistent seller lately. I’m willing to sell smaller profit items when its a small, easy to ship, light weight multi-quantity item. I’ve made $142.23 profit (after all fees and shipping) off of them with 4 left to sell.
I’m still confused about the buyer who returned an item as INAD because it arrived late. If Jay and Ryann are in the guaranteed delivery program, why didn’t eBay cover them for that reason? Was it because the buyer opened an INAD rather than whatever option is available to buyers that don’t receive their items within the guaranteed delivery window? IS there even a return option a buyer can choose if their item arrives late and it was purchased from a guaranteed delivery seller? I’ve never returned anything on ebay so I don’t even know what it looks like on the buyer’s end. I’m wondering if Ebay has made it clear enough to buyers about which steps they need to take if they do not receive their item within the guaranteed delivery.
I’ve been trying to find the initial source of the 300,000 item figure. Every article that mentions that figure credits it to professional organizer Regina Lark. I could not find any article that states where Regina got that figure, only “statistics cited by professional organizer Regina Lark”. I’ve been combing the internet to find what study Regina Lark cited or conducted because I want to know, is a box of 100 toothpicks considered 1 item or 100 items. But I came up with nothing. For all intents and purposes it seems that Regina Lark may have pulled her 300,000 figure from out of thin air.
But I would guess that it has to be at least 100,000 items. Currently there are over 100 items just on my desk (37 pens & marker, 4 laptops, 1 rollo printer, 1 kleenex box, 3 clips, 7 pads of post its, 4 check books, 5 pieces of mail, 4 organizers/holders, 1 desk calendar, 1 box of pushpins (counted as 1 item), 1 coffee cup, 1 iphone, 1 set of wax crayons, 1 tape dispenser, 2 scotch tape rolls, 1 shipping tape roll, 1 glue, 2 USB drives, 1 quarter, 1 pair earrings, 5 safety pins, 3 batteries, 1 bunch of twist ties, 8 paper clips, 1 insurance card, 1 keychain, 1 iphone box, 1 old ring, 1 laminated diamond certificate, 1 eyeglass cleaning cloth, 2 SD cards, 3 notebooks, 1 rock soap, 1 label tray, 1 set of thermal labels.)
I suspect:
1. Trade based money laundering (I’m an anti-money laundering consultant. Money laundering happens on almost every platform, every day and for many more reasons less nefarious than drugs.)
2. Sellers with multiple quantity listings may run out of their item but rather than take down the listing, they jack the price up to an amount where no one will buy it. They bring the price back down when they replenish their stock.
3. Errors. I recently heard maybe even on this podcast where a seller missed a decimal place, listed the item for something like $2000 instead of $20. Buyer sent an offer through ebay message for something like $20 which seller accepted. But in the solds, it appears that the item sold for $2000, even though it actually sold for $20.
4. Shill bidding – seller “sells” a few items at a very high price to a friend or even to themself using another account. Those high sales bring up the seller’s sale figures so they are able to qualify for higher paypal loan amounts and possibly a better loan rate. One popular youtube blogger allegedly got caught doing something like this a few years ago.
5. Wishful thinking – Either the seller thinks the the diamond Disney VHS tapes really are worth $1,000s and lists it as such, or they know darn well that its garbage but hopes someone else will be fooled into paying that much for it.The eBay profit listed on your tax return isn’t your “true” profit because if you take full advantage of deductions, you will have deducted from your profit some expenses that you would have had to pay regardless of having a business or not. For example: my phone. I have to pay my phone bill every month, may as well get the benefit of writing some of that expense off against my ebay profits since I use the phone for ebay. Also, space in my house that wouldn’t have been used for anything anyways (basement storage for example). I get to write off around 17% of my home’s expenses because I use approximately 17% of my house’s square footage for ebay space. Thus while on my taxes ebay profit is shown as X, in actuality it was more than that because of the expenses I got to write off; expenses that I would have still had to pay out of pocket even if I didn’t have an ebay business. Large businesses really take advantage of this to obscene levels. I won’t mention any names but think of some of the wealthiest people in this nation who live like kings and yet show a loss on their taxes year after year. Their accountants have found ways to make many of their every day expenses into business expenses. Things that we small fries could never take advantage of.
I’m a huge fan of the Rollo thermal printer, which came onto the market relatively recently. I am not good with technology and I heard that some brands of label printers can be tricky. But the Rollo was super easy to install and I’ve never had any issues. It prints unbelievably fast. You can buy it from several sites but if you want to see of a video of it in action they have a website rolloprinter.com
Ahhh the 1980s…When I was a kid there was a rash of news stories about the occult. This was probably because so many poltergeist type movies came out around that same time. This resulted in some local parents (mostly moms) being very concerned that Dungeons and Dragons was satanic or a gateway to satan worship. My brother and his friends played D&D a lot. At one point one of the boy’s moms banned it from their house. They could still play it at our house but my mom forbade other things; tarot cards and Ouija boards. She thought that having them around made the house vulnerable to evil spirits.
I took some lower offers for some quick flips this week so I could pay a large tax bill. I was not able to embed Imgur photos, kept getting a “forbidden” error.
Home Depot Shopping Tote – used to go for big money when an actress used one as a purse a few years back. The demand has died down. Listed for $29.99, took $20 within a day of listing for the fast money. https://www.ebay.com/itm/263594864393
Lilly Pulitzer Holiday Skirt – paid $3, sold within hours for $75. I fully expect to get this returned as the buyer asked a million questions (after buying), sent many emails about why I charged sales tax, etc. https://www.ebay.com/itm/263593362514
10 NWT Orla Kiely Washcloths. I paid $1.99 each and took an offer for $10 each. Buyer bought 10 so it was a $100 sale. https://www.ebay.com/itm/262952002872
I’ve sold a bunch of Dragon Ball Z Childrens birthday loot bags. I bought a ton and have been selling them in lots. So far I’ve made $101.36 from the ones that have sold and have 2/3rds of the inventory still left to sell. They sat at my GW forever until they were marked 50% off. After sitting for a while with no action, they’ve been flying off my shelf lately. https://www.ebay.com/itm/262917873991
Retro – Oh I fully expect to get the skirt back as an INAD. I even told my husband last night to “mark my words – the skirt will be returned as not as described.” It’s crazy how easy it is to spot these kinds of buyers even from just their initial offer. Just thankful I don’t have to deal with customers face-to-face. I can only imagine the customer issues the store manager at any given Wal-Mart on any given day must have to deal with.
Antarestar – How does this work exactly? Do you send her a description of each item or photos or do you give her the actual unlisted items?
Thanks.
MDC Galleries – I listened (or read) that Suzanne Wells story too! I live outside of Atlanta (Rome) and man, would I LOVE to walk through one of that guy’s warehouses. I recall one issue was he didn’t want to sell anything in “lots” so right off the bat she was having to list 100s of individual postcards and all as auctions. A lot of time was being spent on postcards that were selling for 99 cents. At 99 cents each obviously the owner wasn’t going to see a lot of return for all of the time and effort. They should have started with some higher dollar items or at least mixed it up. But a 2nd big issue was the Worthpoint owner’s wife did the shipping and she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to keep up with it. Therefore they greatly limited the # of items they’d allow Suzanne to list in a single day. I also suspect that the guy is a hoarder and couldn’t let go of anything except for a few boxes of postcards. And as with most hoarders he places much more value to an item than what its actually worth. He was never going to be happy. It was a no-win situation Suzanne.
