Miami Lawyer Sues Man Over eBay Feedback

Dear Elliot Miller: your feedback is currently 98.8%. That's good. Get over it.

Just when you think that set of flamingo-themed flatware is a questionable enough buy on eBay, your business might be even more risky: the seller could be a Miami lawyer.

Mike Steadman paid $44 for a "working" time clock for his small Cape Canaveral welding business in November 2008, but it didn't work -- and now he's out $7,000 for legal fees and still facing a $15,000 defamation lawsuit from seller Elliot Miller, an attorney living in a $3 million dollar waterfront home on Miami Beach, WFTV reported.

Perhaps he should have purchased a stone and a slingshot.

"I made the mistake of leaving my honest opinion online," Steadman told Florida Today of checking "negative" in the feedback section eBay asks all buyers to complete at the end of a transaction. "The comments are there to let other buyers know who they're dealing with. [But] because I don't have the money to fight them, I'm losing. It's not right. I'm speechless."

Steadman says when he received the clock, it didn't run, stamp time cards, or work with the accompanying set of keys as advertised. "When I opened the box it was in 3 pieces [from three separate models] that didn't even fit."

Miller refused to grant a refund, so Steadman filed a complaint with PayPal's buyer protection plan and eventually got his  $44 back. But the bad taste lingered.

"Bad seller," he wrote in an effort to warn other buyers about EMiller1313. "He has the ethics of a used car salesman."

Unfortunately for Steadman, Miller is juuuuust a tad uptight about feedback. He filed a lawsuit in Miami-Dade court last February, claiming that the single comment lowered his perfect 100 percent positive feedback rate to just 98.6% -- thereby "seriously harming" his "commercial reputation."

Seriously seriously? Apparently so: Miller wants $15,000 in damages from Steadman, whose lawyer quit last week when funds from a second mortgage on his house ran out.

We hereby suggest the buyer who left Miller's only other negative comment -- "Seller suggested we unload obviously broke unit on another unspecting buyer" -- start dodging anyone who could possibly be a process server. 

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