Three people who conned eBay buyers out of £300,000 over a period of two years were jailed for a combined total of eight and a half years at Middlesex Guildhall Crown Court on Friday.

Nicolae Cretanu, 30, and his wife Adriana, 23, a Romanian couple based in East London, were convicted of conning victims into handing over cash through wire services for non-existent goods. George Titar, 23, a Romanian illegal immigrant, was also convicted.

In an interview on BBC Radio Five eBay was robust in its defence that it is doing enough to tackle such criminal activity, despite scores of cases having surfaced over the past three years, albeit involving smaller sums.

A security spokesman for the auction giant said: "We urge people to be vigilant about how they pay for things. If you decide that you trust someone then you should pay with PayPal because if something goes wrong you are covered up to £500."

He went on to explain eBay's view of how such crimes are perpetrated. "The [criminals] set up accounts and in all cases the transactions end [successfully] but the negative behaviour involved separate transactions 'off' eBay," he said.

"What happens is that the people who are victims do not come back and tell us because it happened 'off' eBay.

"So they do not use the feedback mechanism to say 'this guy is not who he says he is' because the transaction did not happen on eBay. So I stress to people to keep it on eBay because that helps us to track what is going on on our website."