Notorious eBay hacker arrested in Romania

What does it matter....

eBay are doing more damage by themselves that all the hackers have ever done to eBay.

Damage to their sellers, buyers and themselves with stupid decisions and changes to a system that was working fine for years and now they have bastardised and crippled the site. Overloaded it with extra code on each page. Made it impossible for dial-up users to use because the amount of crap that each web page has to load in to show an auction can make even a fast DSL connection freeze.

Security features that make it impossible for buyers to tell if a seller is shill bidding an item.

Leave them to screw it up. They are doing a better job that Vladuz ever managed.

shill bidding

I've previously reported shill bidding to ebay where two sellers , a boyfriend and girlfriend, who have boasted about how they have shill bid on each others items to push the price up and ebay have said that there is no evidence when it is blantantly obvious.

Now they hide the user id's of all but the winning bidder so that it's that little bit harder to spot unless you know the user id in advance of the shill bidder user id.

But boy you slightly over price your shipping and handling in the eyes of ebay and you are a master criminal. I don't mean have shipping that is two or three times what it should - I mean 2 or 3 cents more than they have determined to be okay and you are a master criminal.

Their price drops were a sham - 99% of sellers are paying more fee's than before and are at the mercy of all those rip off artists that are equivalent to the shoplifters that steal from a store and then take back the item they stole to get a refund for the stolen item due to the crazy idea that the sellers spend their waking hours thinking of negative feedback to give to all the buyers.

They haven't heard of 'market forces' if a seller is so terrible then pretty soon the buyers won't shop with them. It works the same way online as it does in the old bricks and mortar stores.

They shouldn't have any feedback at all and allow shoppers to buyer from anyone and if the seller is crap then the buyer won't go back. I've seen buyers give a negative feedback to a seller and then put in the feedback WOULD SHOP FROM AGAIN. Well it ain't that bad an experience if they are willing to go back to the seller again.

If I don't like a supermarket I won't go back. I never liked Morrison's chain in the UK so I shopped there once and never went back. The applies online - don't like an online store then I don't buy from again.

But ebay seem to be so retarded that they can't grasp the reality that they are just a shopping mall and shopping malls can only charge rent space they cannot tell a shop how to price their products, who they sell to or how they treat their customers.

Only $1m?

I find it hard to believe that Vlad only walked away with $1m considering his system set up somewthing in the range of 7m - 14m fraudulent auctions PER DAY.

Early 2007 was an exciting time, checking weekly to see what damage Vlad had done and how incompetent eBay press releases sounded. It's a shame he fell for such a simple trick, and at the age of 20? He must've started when he was 18!

I'm still waiting for a photo of our mastermind Vlad (who I have been imagining only as the impaling robot from the short-lived Comedy Central TV show Battlebots).

Vlad the destroyer

eBay are struggling. Their latest effort to eliminate all but PayPal in Australia is just another symptom of a company in turmoil. Do not want, do not use.

I laughed.

Here we have yer archetypal alleged l33t d00d h4x0r.

But when he's presented with the most cheesy of scams (we're honest, genuine l33t h4x0r5 wanting to buy your l33t h4x0r w4r3z, please send us your address so we can send you lots of cash), which yer average junior surfer wouldn't fall for these days, he ponies up like a champion.

Made me laugh. A lot.

@TeeCee

Possibly wasn't that simple - think for a second that the guy actually managed to do something quite complicated, and he was apparently (publicly anyway) the only one to do it - which means not all script kiddies could've done it.

Also, from what i've understood, he never actually stole from eBay, or anybody else in there... so where's the 1 million pigmy dollars coming from ?

While trying to sell the application/method is really dishonest in itself, he really did a lot of good to eBay customers, who found out in a pretty obvious way that eBay is shite.

So, too bad he got arrested.

Hopefully he'll get a lighter sentence (i seriously doubt it, romanian authorities have parroted cybercrime sentences to such a level, you get more for pirating a movie or hacking than you get for rape, robbery, and i think also murder, all in the name of licking up to the EU).

Not to mention it won't be really fun for him in there, what with him in for hacking, and surrounded by murderers and whatnot.

One meeeeeleon dollars of damage?

Not to be confused with theft by the way, anonymous from mars.

I wonder how they define damage, and how they added up that particular total. There seems to be a trend amongst various large US organisations (DoD springs to mind) in bringing up these frivolous sums as the amount required to secure their systems. No matter that they should have spent the money do the securing ahead of time.

It is amusing that Vladuz was caught by such a transparent scam. What on earth was he thinking? Its not like he needed to hand over anything physical. How delightfully naive. Maybe the investigator claimed to be a pretty lady with the big boobies.