Meet the Team: Richard Ambrose
Richard Ambrose took over from Garreth Griffith as Head of Trust and Safety (T&S) at eBay UK on October 1st.
What brought you to Trust and Safety?
I’ve been at eBay for four years – I initially joined to manage the Collectibles category and I’ve been in ‘Finding’ for the last couple of years. (Finding refers to the way people find items to buy on eBay and it has its own team inside the company.) I’ve always been a very passionate about trust and safety and so I was delighted to get the chance to work with the team.
Since you took over, what has been the biggest surprise about T&S?
The global nature of all our challenges was the biggest surprise. Internet crime is a global issue and, unfortunately, there is a small body of professional criminals who attack eBay members in multiple countries. They always try to find the weakest link in our defences so it’s really important that we are consistent wherever we operate. The good news is that if one part of eBay comes up with a brilliant advance to protect members, we can roll it out globally very quickly.
How does eBay work with the police?
We have a close relationship with law enforcement. We have an ongoing training course for police on how to investigate eBay reports and how to prosecute illegal activity on eBay. We have trained thousands of police officers to date. We make ourselves available to appear in court and provide witness statements for prosecutions, but we rely on customers to report crimes in the first place. We’ve seen a steady stream of prosecutions. So far this year, in the UK, we have helped secure 210 arrests and guilty verdicts in 69 different court cases.
What are your priorities for the next year?
The bedrock is combating professional fraud. We want to make it difficult, risky, time-consuming and expensive for the tiny hardcore of professional criminals to operate on eBay. For example, we can try to stop them getting accounts on eBay in the first place and we can be quicker at identifying fraudulent listings.
We often find that that a majority of professional fraud exploits the misuse of unguaranteed payment mechanisms like Western Union or personal cheques. This is precisely why we have banned these payment types from eBay. Secure digital mechanisms like PayPal have much less risk.
We’re experimenting with mandating the use of PayPal in certain areas where we think will think it will have a dramatic effect. For example, we required people to offer it as a payment option by anyone who wanted to list an Apple iPhone.
We’ve also launched a telephone support line for our most frequent buyers and sellers. We expect to roll this service out to more people during 2008.
How widespread is online fraud?
Luckily, the vast majority of eBay users don’t encounter it and have a very positive experience with us. 4m people in the UK visit eBay every day and the vast, VAST majority of their transactions are fun, good value and problem-free.
What advice would you give customers?
My number one tip would be to drop the seller a note via the eBay site and ask them a question about the item. It’s pretty much the best way of establishing their bona fides. You can learn a lot from the tone, attitude, the speed and content of a seller’s reply to a question.
What do you buy and sell on eBay?
I collect medieval coins. Last month I bought a very rare 11th century penny on the site. I was delighted with it. These things are very hard to find and eBay is where I get most of my collection.
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Paypal protection is a load of RUBBISH. When you are mis-sold an item, it does not matter whether you follow their advice, they don’t want to know. ebay say will help, but once you have paid, you are in the lap of the gods. Fraudsters can make money and ebay just don’t want to know.