BE CAREFUL ON EBAY!

By kickntrue on 12/15/09

The largest ever eBay golf club counterfeiting ring was busted and its operatives are now in jail. The company sold over 96,000 fake clubs!

The counterfeiting operation was the biggest of its kind to be investigated by a council trading standards team and the largest such conspiracy to be uncovered on the auction website, Havering Council said.

The defendants sold millions of pounds worth of fake golf clubs and other merchandise through the website between June 2003 and March 2008, a council spokesman said.

Officers identified more than 96,000 transactions of clubs and other equipment occurring during this period.

eBay can be a great place to find deals on golf equipment, but you need to be very careful. A lot of people advise you to buy only from sellers with great ratings but I'm sure these counterfeiters had great ratings. The advice is "be careful" but the truth is there is no 100% solution to how to be careful.

Here are a couple tips though if you do want to go this route:

1) Ask questions to the seller. How fast did they respond? Did they seem to know what they were talking about?

2) Ask for additional pictures, specifically of the branding logos. Most fakes don't get caught from club shape- but from the way they misuse the logo.

3) Study the "real" look of the club from the manufacturers website. Use a picture directly from TaylorMade to determine if the Big Bertha on eBay is real. Again- check the logos carefully.

If you think you may have been a victim of fraud on eBay you should first contact eBay and they will advise you on next steps which may include talking to the police as well as the club OEM (for instance TaylorMade) to try to track the criminals.

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