I understand your sentiments Joyful, but as you said, ebay did what they did to protect ebay. 60 minutes did a segment on them and the current president basically stated that they know that scams go on, they know that some people pad their bids, but don't do anything about it. Why should they really? For every bad bid or situation like JoyC's, there are 999,999,999 other transactions that are legit.
I have yet to sell anything on ebay but am thinking about it.
One good thing about ebay and more importantly, paypal, is that there is buyer protection. If someone scams the buyer, you CAN get your money back and from what I understand, it is relatively straightforward.
As for patent infringement, if you're a developer or builder of anything, as global marketing grows, there will be more and more of this going on. For eg: if you were only selling your item locally in toronto, nimrod in san diego would never know about it.....
I don't know what particulars they ask for when selling, but there have been a couple of instances where people set up accounts, sell bogus items (they don't actually HAVE the items being sold), collect the money and run. A few months later they set up another account, and do it all over again so it can't be that hard to set up another account and sell your item.
