eBay User ‘craigplat10’ and Stolen Images

craigplat10 of Stanley, Durham, United Kingdom stole our 1996 Gold Two Pound UEFA Championship Coin photograph to use on eBay, without our permission, to try to sell his own. Totally dishonest.
Image theft is endemic on eBay, and most sellers appear not to care whether their buyers are deceived.

High eBay Feedback is No Guarantee of Integrity or Honesty
When we wrote this page, this eBay member’s feedback was 2 with 100% Positive Feedback according to eBay.

eBay Copyright Thieves
Many eBay vendors use our coin photographs to sell inferior quality coins on eBay. These eBay members are dishonest and should be avoided.
We believe eBay profits from IP rights infringements (copyright theft), and does so knowingly, only removing infringing items reluctantly, if at all.

What’s Wrong?

We invest a great deal of time, effort, and cost into creating some of the best photographic coin and gold bar images on the internet. We strongly object when lazy and dishonest people decide to use them without a by your leave or thanks, doing so in competition with us.

In this case, the seller is using our image of a gold two pound coin, when the coin the seller actually has is the copper-brass coin. This is misleading to the buyer.

It is always possible, even likely, that sellers who steal photographs do not own a similar bar, and have the intention to totally defraud potential buyers.

Copyright theft is dishonest. We recommend you avoid doing business with dishonest dealers. The vendor is not only cheating us by stealing our copyright images, he is fraudulently or ignorantly misleading and deceiving all potential buyers. Gaining pecuniary advantage by deception is the definition of fraud.

Sample Listing

Seller ID: craigplat10
Item Number: 160698878311
Date: 18th December, 2011
Description: 1996 £2 Two Pound Euro Football Coin

Price: £5.50.

Price
The seller was asking for a starting price of £1.50 and the item sold for £5.50.

Even after eBay’s greedy 10% selling fees, and possible PayPal charges, the seller would almost certainly have been much better off selling the coins to us, instead of stealing our photographs.