I am at the fifth annual eBay Live conference in Las Vegas. I spent Monday at a Collectibles Summit, which was a group of industry experts, newspaper personnel and otheres related to home décor as well as antiques and collectibles.

During the summit one of the speakers was Rob Chestnut, head of the Trust & Safety Department on eBay. I thought you would find some of his information interesting. There are 2,000 people working in the Trust & Safety department around the world. There are 60 staff members who do nothing but work with law enforcement officials on a daily basis, as well as testifying in court cases. “We also get on airplanes and go to countries where there are problems and work with local law enforcement there,” Chestnut said. He added they had just gotten back from Romania last week and this was the team’s fifth trip there in a year.

Chestnut said one of the areas they are focusing on in the coming year is cracking down on sellers who charge exorbitant amounts for shipping.

Another interesting point involved phishing, sending emails that sound as if the recipient has to log into a website and change his account information or risk having his account closed. Anyone who gets email, gets these from banks, eBay, PayPal and other sites. EBay had its eBay toolbar, which alerts users if they are about to be directed to a site that is not an eBay site. But, that doesn’t work for users going to other sites under false pretenses. Chestnut said by fall most of the common browsers will have anti-phishing software installed. If you get an email saying your PayPal account is about to be closed and you click on the link, the toolbar will alert you that the site you are about to enter is not authorized by PayPal.

Shill bidding is another area Chestnut’s department looks into. He said half the shill team looks into complaints filed by users, while the other half looks through eBay for patterns. Chestnut said he couldn’t discuss how they do it or what they look for, but he said his team is good at finding shills.

Another good tip Chestnut had was to have an eBay user ID that has nothing to do with your email address. He said there are groups who look at eBay user IDs and then add the most common email providers to the end. So, if your eBay ID was Fluffy and your email address was fluffy@aol.com, then this program would be able to email you and you would have no idea where it came from. The program just puts Fluffy in front of all the common providers like yahoo.com; hotmail, aol, etc.

I’m getting ready to go to the Keynote address provided by Meg Whitman, eBay President and CEO and Bill Cobb, President of eBay North America.

Stay tuned, because in this case, what happens in Vegas, ends up here.