Members without scruples- a continuation

Although the thread topic primarily addresses potential fraud, I've found that some legitimate dealers seriously inflate their own feedback. As you probably know, many dealers cultivate shills to sell for them. This way the dealer can unload a slow-selling product without incurring the wrath of that product's manufacturer. Many manufacturers do not like their products dumped as it devalues their product in the secondary market. The dealer's have their shills provide feedback for every item they've dumped. Normally I could care less, but some fairly sleazy dealers use this tool to provide themselves with huge amounts of positive feedback, and to bury any negetive feedback they may have.
This ongoing practice makes dealer evaluation tricky. It's better to ask about a dealer on a forum and have responses emailed, rather than depend on Audiogon's feedback.

Your so correct Octopus.
Audiogon feedback is one of the largest jokes on the internet.
It is totaly useless.
The bone heads who run this site need to put a proper system in place.
Rives on ebay you can only leave fedback on a completed transaction. The seller is charged for a sale. So if they do it on ebay they do it at a cost. Here its scam away for free. You dont even need to place a classified.

Comment to Natalie: I have no personal or business connection with Audiogon, but I think your characterization of the Audiogon staff as "boneheads" is unfair and unwarranted. I also disagree with your comment that the feedback feature is "one of the largest jokes on the Internet" (can you quote some specific data to support this view?).

From my perspective, I think the audiophile community has been very well served by this site and by the staff who run it. Over the past several years, the A-gon staff has made a number of improvements to the site, often in response to requests from members.

Further, there are many members of Audiogon who have been diligent in building a positive reputation as both buyers and sellers, and to characterize the resulting feedback as essentially pointless is neither useful no accurate. I agree that there is certainly room for abuse in the feedback system, and perhaps 10-15% of the feedback is inflated, so I'd like to hear your specific ideas about how it can be improved (without instituting an additional fee). It's much too easy to simply be negative without offering a better alternative.

Sdcampbell, perhaps Audiogon can set up the feedback system so only the seller and buyer can input comments after both close the transaction. The feedback links could be contained in the transaction history page. Another thing Audiogon could do is insert a link to previous auctions, so members could gauge based on what was previously bought and sold. E-bay has a function like this.