There’s always been the occasional listing with a price several orders of magnitude disconnected from reality. Have never understood it, seems too blatant to be fraud. Now, whether there’s more of them now, I don’t know.
Money laundering. Sometimes people just need a legal place to disappear a lot of money, and those way-too-high listings by third party sellers are part of the system that they either create for themselves or pay someone else to do for them. As long as they (or their launderer) control the listing, they get the money back at the end, and meanwhile if anyone else is stupid enough to buy their way overpriced item, they just buy them one, ship it, and pocket the difference.
I always thought it was people that couldn’t fulfill the ad but didn’t want to take it down either, so they set the absurd price to effectively “pause” the ad. Pure speculation on my part tho.
There’s always been the occasional listing with a price several orders of magnitude disconnected from reality. Have never understood it, seems too blatant to be fraud. Now, whether there’s more of them now, I don’t know.
Money laundering. Sometimes people just need a legal place to disappear a lot of money, and those way-too-high listings by third party sellers are part of the system that they either create for themselves or pay someone else to do for them. As long as they (or their launderer) control the listing, they get the money back at the end, and meanwhile if anyone else is stupid enough to buy their way overpriced item, they just buy them one, ship it, and pocket the difference.
I always thought it was people that couldn’t fulfill the ad but didn’t want to take it down either, so they set the absurd price to effectively “pause” the ad. Pure speculation on my part tho.
rich old people who care more about familiar than price