Contacting the bidder is considered interfering with an auction and is very much against eBay policy. If you are caught (usually by the bidder contacting the seller, quoting you to get out of the deal, and the seller then contacting eBay) you may be wrist-slapped or outright kicked off. Remember that eBay saves and can read all eBay messages, so once they know you have done this they can pretty easily check to see if it's a pattern.
Meanwhile - these $88 auctions are all done by scripting - yes, the seller can put them up faster than you can report them. They run their malicious little script and it grabs random photos and text and voilà, 54 auctions all at the same price. The people who purchase these either get some piece of junk, or nothing at all. The cost to the seller is minimal - they don't need many people to "bite" before they are making a good profit. My guess is that eBay's approach is to try to stop them in an automated way, but that's a tricky process - how to stop the malicious scripts without disabling the legitimate scripts? I would also guess that eBay is not making any money from allowing them to be up, because the sellers are not paying their fees - they just drop that account and make a new one.
As for VeRO, it would be Gucci Group that would manage it; from what I've been able to determine, they seem to go in waves against a certain target - e.g. for some period of time it will be impossible to sell GG products on iOffer because their lawyers are all over it - but then it will ease up again.
After a period of spending an hour a day reporting bad auctions, I've kind of given up - which is not to say I've quit eBay, just that I've given up trying to solve at the micro level the problem that really needs to be resolved between GG and eBay.
Meanwhile - these $88 auctions are all done by scripting - yes, the seller can put them up faster than you can report them. They run their malicious little script and it grabs random photos and text and voilà, 54 auctions all at the same price. The people who purchase these either get some piece of junk, or nothing at all. The cost to the seller is minimal - they don't need many people to "bite" before they are making a good profit. My guess is that eBay's approach is to try to stop them in an automated way, but that's a tricky process - how to stop the malicious scripts without disabling the legitimate scripts? I would also guess that eBay is not making any money from allowing them to be up, because the sellers are not paying their fees - they just drop that account and make a new one.
As for VeRO, it would be Gucci Group that would manage it; from what I've been able to determine, they seem to go in waves against a certain target - e.g. for some period of time it will be impossible to sell GG products on iOffer because their lawyers are all over it - but then it will ease up again.
After a period of spending an hour a day reporting bad auctions, I've kind of given up - which is not to say I've quit eBay, just that I've given up trying to solve at the micro level the problem that really needs to be resolved between GG and eBay.
