Nothing new from eBay on the Nautiluso Jazz Vinyl Fraud. I had sent a follow-up note asking specifically what eBay was doing about paying off victims of the scam and I haven’t gotten a response. I’ll follow up sometime today or tomorrow. I’m sure they’re sick of hearing from me. Also, there’s no new feedback on the profile page for Nautiluso. Frankly, I’m surprised eBay still has the page up and available.

Some of the Jazz Collector readers have commented offline about the fraud, presumably because they wanted to be anonymous on the site. I will share excerpts here:

“With all the viewers on these auctions, why is it that no one has commented one way or the other, that the pictures must have been snatched from other websites (popsike) or older eBay listings?  I say this as presumably he never had these records and was planning this caper for some time.  Did anyone not recognize their own pictures? I have seen this issue addressed in other auctions and the seller rightly acknowledges that these were stock or someone else’s pictures. Just a thought.”

“I hope ebay does the right thing. it would look pretty awful if they didn’t, though they make you jump thru hoops to get any satisfaction. i bought a bogus chanel #5 a few years back. It smelled like piss, and to get back the 50 bucks I had to go to a perfumery and have them state in writing that it wasn’t the real stuff. Then a hundred more phonecalls – At least I learned a lesson-”

“Hi Al…Same thing, only worse, happened a couple of years ago from a seller in Italy with a collection too good to be true, with  NO PICTURES and only feedback from selling trivial items.  Thanks,   Chuck in Michigan”

“Hey Al, I wasn’t buying what they were selling (so to speak). They also listed some heavy Classical pieces as well. It smelled like yesterdays socks!”

“I have an short update for you and your readers. I appreciate your patience and I’m sure you understand that an international investigation takes time. You can tell your readers that eBay is continuing to investigate this matter and has filed a criminal complaint with the Berlin Police. This is all the detail I can provide at this time.”

That’s all we have for now, but it’s really fascinating and gives us hope that we’ll eventually get to the bottom of what actually happened. Also, I went through all of our

previous Nautiluso coverage earlier today and put everything under a new category called “Jazz Vinyl Fraud.” If you click it under “Categories” on the right side of the page you can see all of the articles at once — 17 of them so far, with dozens of reader comments. Enjoy.

the original listings of the records that were part of the fraud. I clicked on to several of them and what comes up is a message that tells you that the listing has been removed. Normally eBay keeps listings up for 90 days after the auction closes. In the case of these records, at least the ones I was watching, they have all been taken down. You can try clicking this one as an example: Jackie McLean, The New Tradition, Ad Lib 6601. Fortunately at Jazz Collector we were watching a large number of the auctions and kept them on the record. One of our readers who suspected a fraud early on actually added up all of the Nautiluso records and the prices for which they sold. It came to a total of $132,000 — but he didn’t save the document, so there’s no full record of everything. Based on what we saw, I’m comfortable that the $132,000 figure is an accurate assessment. Perhaps if eBay ever calls back and acknowledges what happened we’ll find out for sure. But we shouldn’t hold our breath, right?