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Quote:A LONDON couple conned eBay customers around the world out of £300,000. Nicolae Cretanu, 30, and his wife Adriana, 23, swindled thousands of victims into paying for everything from non-existent cars to concert tickets.

They bought a flat in Forest Gate and a BMW with the proceeds of Britain's biggest such fraud, which lasted two years. The couple worked for crime bosses in Romania who offered fictitious goods on the internet auction site

...the Cretanus collected the cash using 12 aliases

Quote:As three Romanian fraudsters start their jail sentences for conning eBay customers out of £300,000, one regular online buyer tells ...how he fell for the scam and lost his cash.

When he saw a new state-of-the-art mobile phone for sale on eBay earlier this year - one not yet on general release - he went for it on a 'buy it now' fixed price basis...

"He said I should call Western Union to make the money transfer. When I asked him why he didn't have a PayPal account he said his wife had had a car accident in Romania and they needed the money immediately.

Quote:Three people who conned eBay buyers out of £300,000 over a period of two years were jailed for a combined total of eight and a half years at Middlesex Guildhall Crown Court on Friday.

In an interview on BBC Radio Five eBay was robust in its defence that it is doing enough to tackle such criminal activity, despite scores of cases having surfaced over the past three years, albeit involving smaller sums.

The spokesman added that eBay's recent research indicated that only 15 per cent of its users understand that it is their responsibility to protect themselves...