Well I've just be locked out of Trademe because I gave an invalid firearms licence number!

I got an email from support@trademe.co.nz saying the following

"We note that you have continued to enter incorrect firearms licence information when bidding on a firearm.

As stated in a previous email to you, this is a very serious matter and your ability to bid on auctions in the rifle and shotgun categories has been removed.

If you fax us a photocopy of your firearms licence we will re-enable this ability. Please fax this to us on 04 974 4820 and include your username on the fax. Alternatively, you can email us a copy of your firearms licence as an attachment to tmcs@trademe.co.nz.

If you have any questions regarding this issue please use the 'contact us' link at the bottom of any Trade Me page."

Well I've looked in the "Contact us" link and I'm buggered if I can find any "contact details", No ph numbers, no email. Trademe dont want to talk to their customers at all!

So it appears the only option I have to send them an abusive fax or email to tmcs@trademe.co.nz.

How about everyone who uses trademe for firearms faxing them on 04 974 4820 advising them that their requirement to provide your firearms licence number is a serious breach of privacy, and you therefore want an assurance they will not give this information out and if they cant give you that assurance, you will stop using trademe!

You could also ask them to provide some real contact details on their contact links page so their customers can actually talk to someone!

Come on, if they suddenly received 150 faxes complaining, they may reconsider their policy!

Cheers

Grant

they have an 0900 number which I think is stupid as they are making more money when you ring them about anything even though trademe is an avenue for selling and buying I feel that they need to have a normal landline number for general issues

Two questions - how do they know the number is false and ... why does it matter if they know what your licence number is?

I asked this question:

Just wondering why it is compulsory to enter a firearms licence number for asking questions on Firearms? It is noted in the announcments that this is to comply with the law.

I feel it is a concern that a third party could be holding my contact details, address etc and my firearms licence.

What assurances do you have that prevent these details from being released?


This was the response I recieved:


Dear Jordan,

Thanks for contacting us.

We hold firearms license numbers securely and do not forward them to anybody else except where we are legally required, i.e if we have been served a search warrant by the police.

Although we initially only required firearms license numbers when bidding on firearms, many members were trying to bypass this by placing their contact details in the Q&A. As much as we don't want this to happen, at least now if it does we have a record of who has purchased the firearm. This means we are in a better position to help the police if something horrible happens as a result of someone procuring a firearm off Trade Me.

If you have further questions regarding this issue please reply and we will answer your email as soon as possible.

Regards,

Sophia-Grace

Trade Me Support

Dont give trademe your firearms licence number. You will be giving up your own personal security. It only takes a disgruntled ex trademe staff member to sell your data to the higest bidder. It is not there right to collect this data from you.

Do attempt to contact the person privately through the auction - use the pretense that you want to inspect the goods. This allows you to initaite a private sale. You then only run the risk of abusing the trademe rules and this is hard to prove.

the issue is that if trademe user details end up in the wrong hands, someone will be a very large list of people and addresses who have a firearms license and are therefore a good candidate for having firearms stolen!

Trademe have no legal requirement to hold or verify that the person they are "brokering" the deal has a firearms licence, that up to the individuals making hte sale/purchase

there is an explanation trademe is a cover up site to thier real site which they wish no one to know about as it was a retard who started it all but lets expose trademe for what it really is right here right now(I think I posted this a while ago) 

Ladies and gents I proudly present to you trademe's real site www.tardme.co.nz

As has been stated before the FAL number allocation is probably controlled by an algorithm, with a check digit of some sort, much like credit cards (see http://www.merriampark.com/anatomycc.htm).

If so, it is a simple matter to run the inputted number through the reverse of the algorithm and get a valid/invalid answer, hence it being instant, when they tell you a number is invalid.

Now, if you found out what the algorithm was you could create your own number(complete with satanic messages for all you Dan Brown fans ), that would pass the test and TM would be happy.