You want a KKK pocket knife or a bogus Tiffany ring - Ebay's the place for you.
Charles "Chip" Stanish, director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, says archaeologists were initially "terrified" that Ebay's arrival in the online antiquities market would send demand for ancient objects sky-high and more looters into sacred spaces in search of fodder.
But that didn't happen, not because of Ebay's self-policing (which most admit is pretty poor) but rather because most of the fraudsters selling there quickly realized they didn't need the real deal - they only needed the cheap knockoffs already proliferating on the tourist market.
In the May/June issue of Archaeology magazine Stanish goes on to say:"Now, 95 percent of the stuff you're looking at on eBay is not real."
An Ebay spokesman says that if fake antiquities were as rampant as Stanish says, buyers would complain and eBay would police the problem, but that it's not a problem they "hear about."
Hmmm.
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