Something comes to mind about "rather letting 1,000 men go free than imprison one innocent man".

You can interpret eBay's response as being "gutless", or even go to the extreme and assume that if they were to pull the auction, tney would lose the Listing and Final Vlaue fees, so they let this stuff slide to make more money.

On the other hand, you can take their response, boilerplate that it is, for exactly what it says "Although you may be extremely knowledgeable about these types of items, we often cannot remove items upon the representations of third parties whose credentials we cannot verify, unless of course the alleged infringement is obvious on its face."

I would suspect that Safeharbor receives hundreds of these complaints every week, many of which are petty ("that's not a 1934 widget, it's a 1934 1/2"), and some of which are surely from disgruntled competitors intending to sabotage an item. If you were a Safeharbor employee, I think it would only take you one day to realize that not every complaint is accurate, and before ending a man's auction, you better be darn sure it deserves to be pulled.

In the case of "that's a counterfeit Versace sweater, not a real one", they immediately forward the complaint to Versace's VERO department, and let them handle it. And, as eBay says, if the fraudulent description is "obvious on its face", they end the auction.

Surely, you have to admit that whether or not the Redwood Lodge actually exists is not exactly obvious on it's face, and the seller's statement in the description that he has no idea if the chips have collector value makes it harder for eBay to see fraud. Of course, we know what the slimey seller is doing, but can you see that it may not be so obvious to eBay?

eBay said they "taken appropriate action", and from my experience, I assume they have noted the complaint in the seller's file, and will check future complaints against the file to spot a trend towards fraudulent descriptions, and they may well have written to the seller as well, with a "we're watching" form letter.

Like Jim said, $500 is not a bad deal whether the high bidder believes the Redwood Lodge exists or not. The seller certainly knows he's being watched by members of this board, and ultimately, it's the bidder's responsibility to make sure he knows what he's bidding on.

As far as Jim's willingness to "warn" bidders by email, which is clearly against eBay rules, we disagree on that one. No need to rehash the old "two wrongs don't make a right" argument. Readers of this thread may want to remember that they might not have Jim's legal resources to fight what is a suspendible offense.