Hi guys, just a report on a great initiative I’ve been following these past few months involving one of my favourite Facebook buying, selling and trading groups for vintage Star Wars – Echo Base UK Trading Vintage Star Wars 1977-1985. The UK based group was created almost two years and has now blown out to approximately 2000 members. Well done fellas! It is administered by Adam Pemberton, with the help of Paul Desykes, Paul Smith, Wayne Totty, Dean Keenan and John McDermott. I’ve seen all of these guys around the groups and they really are a good bunch of blokes. They do their best to ensure their group runs smoothly for their members. And they have a great group banner too!
About three months ago the Echo Base UK admin group introduced a fantastic scammer busting rule that sellers have to include a piece of paper with their name and the date in their sales advertisements. Admin John McDermott tells me that the rule came about after a ‘member’ attempted to scam members by using stolen eBay pictures in his sales ad. His scam attempt failed after the admins asked him to add a photo of his name and date written on a piece of paper to prove ownership. After that protection measure succeeded they decided to ask all members to follow this procedure. As John says, it’s very easy to steal pictures from the internet and we all know it only takes a matter of minutes for someone to get scammed.
I for one think this is a great idea and it really adds an extra layer of protection to what can already be a murky world of online vintage dealing. While John tells me that some groups have already followed their initiative, I think this would be a great rule for other Facebook groups to rally around. True it does take a little bit of extra time to post that extra information and yes some well-known collectors may feel their egos slightly deflated having to prove their sales items are actually theirs but isn’t this group effort worth knowing that our community is safer? Not only will it help against scammers but it will protect against those sellers who ‘flip’ before they have the item in hand (a real no no in our hobby – see Ross Barr’s great article for more info – http://vintagestarwarscollectors.com/guest-collector-ross-barr-and-the-ethics-of-flipping/). We all complain about scammers yet here we are being gifted with a practical solution to assist our fight against these scumbags.
We rallied around the anti u-grade and repro causes, why not conjure that same energy to rally around an anti-scammer initiative? Let’s do this! In the next week or so I will implement this rule in the small Luke Skywalker focus collectors group I admin (our first rule!) and will discuss the rule in the groups I co-admin.
Special thanks to John McDermott for his roving reporting 🙂