[jshepherd]

At a brick and mortar store you do have other options, many of which you do not have on eBay. You have the BBB, the FCC, and the local jurisdiction. Any B&M that intentionally, consistently committed the type of fraud seen on eBay would be shut down.
If you are in the "right", you can win against a B&M. With eBay, the only thing you can typically succeed in doing is starting a "he said, she said", or "tit for tat" war. Why do you think all those scam artists (like pearlcity1998) can survive? Easy, no one is willing to risk reciprocal negative feedback for a few dollars, even though they know they were defrauded.

I feel your take on Mabe as being fraud is not correct. The culture of blister pearls in the Pteria Penguin, also known as "Mabe gai" or "eboshi gai" led to the trade term Mabe. The Japanese did not invent this method, they borrowed it from the Chinese. Mabe is now a trade term for all worked blister pearls which came before the name. It has been this way for decades. The GIA approves it, and it is described as such in every recent pearl book including Strack. I see no fraud there. The entire industry is in agreement on this one.

If we took this argument to bead nucleated freshwater, that would mean Tahitians, South Sea and Kasumi pearls could be called Akoya. But they cannot - they each have their own defined trade name as they always have.