CONSUMER ACTIVISM Parents fight back when formula scammer uses eBay

Saving on a staple of babyhood isn't easy.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Of all the scoundrels on the Internet, few are lower than the baby formula scammer.
Yes, baby formula scammer -- as in taking advantage of sleep-deprived parents and their hungry (and therefore cranky) infants.
It happened to Rob Jaworski, who lives in San Jose, Calif., and an army of others who discovered they could save a bundle by buying Enfamil online.
"It turned out that my wife one day started poking around and found that there is a lot of formula that is traded on eBay," he says.
Jaworski, who worked for years at Netscape and America Online, thought of the Internet as a friend, a useful tool, something to be celebrated not feared.
So he and his wife bid on a few cans here and there. In January, Jaworski was laid off, which left him much more time to concentrate on his 6-month-old daughter and her formula needs.
He became something of a baby formula day-trader. He'd study the various can sizes, the number of cans and the shipping deals being offered by different sellers.
"I had my calculator out, and I would figure out how much it would cost me per dry ounce," he says.
Anything in the 60 or 70 cent range, he'd pounce on. Once the price hit 85 cents, forget it.
"We were saving anywhere from 20 [percent] to 50 percent."
Which is saying a lot for a product that often tops $1 an ounce at the supermarket.
Trouble brewing
It was a beautiful system, until the February day Jaworski bought $107 worth of formula from an eBay seller who went by pezsaver.
"That one was going to keep us going for a little while," he says of the order. "It was just never showing up."
Then he heard from a guy in Seattle who explained that he knew of several others who had been stiffed on formula by pezsaver. And those names led to other names. Soon e-mails were flying back and forth and being copied here and there.
And it was a mess.
So, Jaworski started a Yahoo group for those who'd been scammed by pezsaver. The group became something of a digital neighborhood watch. They swapped stories. They helped each other get refunds through eBay's partner PayPal.
And they began tracking pezsaver -- tracking him to Crete, Neb.
Bonnie Pawlowski -- a group member who paid for about $95 worth of formula that never came -- had researched pezsaver's selling history on eBay and she'd carried on an extended e-mail exchange with him.
"It's not like I have all this time," says Pawlowski, an accountant from Troy, Mich. "I just needed to show this guy that you just don't do this."
She turned her information over Sgt. Ron Koch, of the Crete Police Department.
"Her starting this, and all the information she provided, was fantastic," Koch says.