Tell HN: I was permanently banned from eBay in one hour | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: I was permanently banned from eBay in one hour

612 pointsbannedfromebay441 comments

I have some extra electronics around my house that I’d like to sell so I signed up for an eBay account. In one hour I posted 6 listings totaling less than 500GBP.

I received an email that my account was suspended. I was told to call eBay.

I have called twice and been told that I am banned from selling on eBay for life with no ability to appeal or hear the reason for my ban. I am not allowed to create a new account.

On both phone calls I asked to speak to a supervisor. In both cases the agent promptly hung up on me.

Don’t use eBay. They collected a ton of my sensitive information (address, phone, bank account, etc) and then insta-banned me without even having the courtesy to explain why or let me appeal.

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Welcome to the automated account suspension age of the internet, where companies shoot first and don't care later, as the amount of false positives is not worth putting any meagerly (if there's any already) real, physical support to resolve. This can apply to smaller companies too, for other but equally pricey reasons. The amount of fraudulent activity attempts online may warrant those aggressive measures from their business perspective (that are also not limited to passive data collection, but taking active steps such as scanning targets' ports [0]). Unfortunately, if you live in certain areas or are forced to use mobile networks, with IPs constantly refreshing multiple times a day, major services can be almost unusable, and the user may not even realize the reason why. Some—for reasons I'm not knowledgeable about—do it better than others, but it may simply be about the resources put into it and the amount of risk a miss could amount to.

0. https://blog.nem.ec/2020/05/24/ebay-port-scanning/

> Unfortunately, if you live in certain areas or are forced to use mobile networks, with IPs constantly refreshing multiple times a day, major services can be almost unusable

Here's a handy list of valid uses for IP addresses:

1. Packet routing.

I'm okay with very short lived IP bans to fight DDoS attacks. But yeah, that's about it.

How am I to remember all that? I need a mnemonic.

Just remember the handy acronym "PACKET ROUTING"!

It's right there at the start: I. P.

I wonder if you can, under GDPR, request that all your data is deleted and then create a new account. Not allowing you to create a new account could be argued as a violation of GDPR as it would mean that they kept personally identifiable data about you.

This is what I was going to say. As an American, I have no recourse in these situations. Europeans are fortunate to have governing bodies with at least some teeth. Not sure how that applies to UK citizens post-Brexit, though.

They have the UK-GDPR now.

https://www.cookiebot.com/en/uk-gdpr/

> As an American

A bit over 10% (and probably somewhat higher than 10% on HN) of Americans do have something like GDPR. California Consumer Privacy Act. I'm not including Colorado, Virginia, or Utah because I'm not sure how equivalent their laws are.

> This is what I was going to say. As an American, I have no recourse in these situations. Europeans are fortunate to have governing bodies with at least some teeth. Not sure how that applies to UK citizens post-Brexit, though.

GDPR applies to all individuals in the EU, not just citizens.

If I were trying to be sneaky, could you create a series of hashes of the name/email/address/bank type of info to stored on GDPR deletion request that could then be checked against any new account creation? Since the only data stored after deletion would be a hash with no PII remaining, is this a viable workaround?

If you can use hash to identify someone then its pii by definition

I do not agree. The identity can be extended with some GUID and then hashed. The GUID and hash can be kept, but the identity discarded. Then the original identity is lost, but if encountered again, it will be known that it was previously seen.

It's not clear to me how from a privacy perspective that's different from the hash of an id.

It's different because a hash of the ID can be used by anyone who knows the hashing algorithm. If the ID is combined with a UUID/GUID and the UUID/GUID is kept secret/isolated by the entity doing verification, then nobody else can make use of the hash, even those within the entity organization who do not have access to the UUID/GUID. The UUID/GUID itself is not PII so it can probably be retained without violating the GDPR. The same goes for the hash. And since there is no way to reconstruct the original ID given the UUID/GUID and hash, there should be no GDPR violation.

In a large entity such as Google, you almost need to outsource ID verification to ensure it's not abused by other (advertising/marketing) parts of Google. Of course all of this requires good faith on the part of the implementing entity, which is certainly not guaranteed.

>but if encountered again, it will be known that it was previously seen

But when you see it again you have personally identified the individual have you not? Doesn’t that by definition mean it is identifiable if you are able to determine the identity later?

This is something that advertisers/supermarket points schemes etc used to do when they didn’t have consent to share personal data, hash it and align it with what they already had so effectively they shared the subsets of interest anyway. I remember at university when some guys from yahoo sponsored a hack event, they literally gave a guest lecture boasting about doing this with Sainsbury’s to squeeze through a legal loophole back in 2013.

That's the fun of thought experiments, the rabbit hole just keeps going.

If your original delete request was followed so that everything they knew about you was deleted, they would not be able to relink everything that GUID linked to. It should be gone now. However, if that hashed value lives in a BANNED_ACCOUNTS table, then all they have to do is create the hash, check the table, disallow new account. You can even do it in good faith by not storing any of the new info rather than storing it and forcing a new delete request.

Not really, as GDPR is not only about screwing up big companies. Certain kind of data must be saved by companies (like financial transactions). You can request the deletion, but they are still allowed to save some of the data.

Is this a way around Reddit bans?

Generally, no.

GDPR specifically carves out keeping data for "legitimate business needs" including fraud prevention and so on. Whatever data Ebay (thinks it) has about this person that they are using to enforce the ban would be data that they would argue falls under this clause.

This is circular. If there was no reason to ban him then keeping the data for fraud prevention purposes obviously doesn’t hold any water.

keeping information for the purposes of enforcing rules and bans is explicitly allowed in GDPR and you are not forced to delete it. (similarly, you can't ask a company to delete all the stuff you've bought and sold them from their accounts)

However many companies are sufficiently scared of the GDPR and potentially keeping data they shouldn't accidentally that they will just delete everything about you. You can totally use that to get the 'new customer discount' again at Uber for example...

Contrary to popular understanding, the GDPR does not allow you to force a company to delete all data about you.

In effect, it lets you revoke your consent for the company to store and process your data. But it also provides for cases where your data can be processed without your consent. It's not an unlimited carte blanche, but fraud prevention is explicitly given as an example of a legitimate purpose.

This is correct.

Businesses are allowed to retain information necessary to operate. Which would include things like names, email addresses, IP addresses, etc of people who are banned (to prevent them from returning).

If GDPR required a company to delete everything, it would be impractical. (E.g. imagine you request a company delete your info, and then you immediately sue them for something that happened while using their product/service… the company wouldn’t be able to defend themselves unless they retained a record/logs of your usage.

You can submit a deletion request, but in most cases much of your data won’t actually be deleted.

> Which would include things like names, email addresses, IP addresses, etc of people who are banned (to prevent them from returning).

I'm not sure about that. The company might reason it needs this data to operate, but you should be able to contest that with a data protection authority.

The data that you can not request to delete is for example money transaction data, which the company has to retain for 10 years or so due to other laws.

Curious - has anyone here submitted a complaint to a data authority? I wonder what that process is like.

I have. It was about a company that kept spamming me with SMSes. I had to file an archaic form for a government agency. It took a while, I received a few emails about progress and asking for additional details.

The spam stopped.

Thank you for the hint. Will do that.

I was banned the same way as the OP, few months ago. They(humans)collected my Id, bank details, personal address, original invoice of the items I was selling, some calls, to finally ban my 15+ year user.

Keeping that data to maintain a ban seems self-evidently in the space of "needed for the health and operation of the service."

At the very least, I'm sure eBay lawyers would be happy to argue the point.

Also, under the GDPR, you may have the right for any solely-automated decision making about you to then involve a human:

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

Mind you, there's nothing to stop eBay from having someone now look at your data and go 'nope'.

...or claiming "yup I looked"

Under GDPR, a company may retain personal data if it has a legitimate interest in doing so. To what extent this applies here, I do not know.

You might have a chance to successfully challenge the termination by legal means, if you actually did not violate Ebay's terms and conditions.

"For fraud prevention purposes" is a legitimate interest, so the probably won't work.

Keeping PII for fraud detection is not barred by GDPR.

In this context the more relevant aspect of GDPR, which I think receives too little attention and more so enforcement, is article 22 (Automated individual decision-making, including profiling)

Love that idea.

They probably check an external list upon account creation. If the ban had to do with KYC (Know-your-customer) and the user is on or unintentionally confused with a banned entity, then it doesn’t matter.

that's wrong, they are allowed to keep some data

No, fraud prevention is one of the widely accepted reasons for data storage under GDPR.

The should make a movie in which a person gets expelled from society because of a bug. In his long quest for his reinstatement, he needs to endure the great corrupted algorithms trying to erase him for good.

I give you "Brazil" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/)

edit: typo corrected, thanks.

"Brazil"

one of my all-time favorites! ...aaand this is my receipt, for your receipt.

Love it. The "studio ending" makes it even more Orwellian, to the point I wonder if they did that on purpose. (Can that much competence be true?)

Wonderful movie, but good god is it long and hard to watch at times

So is life

Settle down Nietzsche its going to be okay.

Exactly, the first thing that comes to mind.

Alas, watching Gilliam's other films gets more and more difficult, even though he tries to make the same movie again and again, for almost forty years now. But ‘Brazil’ was a home run on the first attempt.

Yes, Time Bandits was just an attempt to remake Brazil. So was Imaginarium. /s

‘Time Bandits’ was before, so it's the other way around.

Besides, you might be unfamiliar with the fact that Gilliam referred to ‘Bandits’, ‘Brazil’ and ‘Munchausen’ as a trilogy about the same thing. Which trilogy evidently ended up having at least nine films in it, excepting ‘F&L’ and me having not watched ‘Quixote’ yet (the latter's theme obviously follows the rest, though).

As for a full-on remake: that's ‘Zero Theorem’. I can only guess that Gilliam lost hope in the subtler approach, and wanted to have at least something new that would get out of ‘Brazil’'s shadow. Which didn't work at all.

Perhaps Tom Stoppard is the missing ingredient.

Thought we were better than doing /s here.

In this case, it's a shorter version of "here are counter-examples to your assertion".

Brazil is pretty much that movie if you haven't seen it already.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)

This is why I named my son Droptable Stuxnet.exe Null

And from here we go on to https://xkcd.com/327/

Kafka explored this in great depth, albeit in analog form.

I don't think I fully appreciate the assignments to read Kafka in college until these algorithmic bans, ousting from app stores, automated support, etc came along. Before that I figured the human element could, in most cases even if it required extreme difficulty, sort things out eventually. Then came these heuristic algorithms that have practically become the platonic ideal if Kafka-esque systems.

Edit: While Amazon is very far from perfect and has dropped several notches in customer service, I will say that they are still very good compared to others. I can still get ahold of a real person that has some leeway for professional judgement when addressing a problem.

I agree with you fully - it was hard to understand Kafka (as a student) until presented with half a life of examples from society.

This is basically what I think of everything I read about in English literature class in high school.

You're asked to comment on so many things that you haven't heard of. 19th century English class anxiety, extreme poverty in London, slavery and race relations in America, midcentury dystopias (global) and unreasonable justice systems in central Europe (?). All things an ordinary Scandinavian teenager at the end of the 21st century is not going to have a whole lot of perspective on until they've lived a little bit longer.

But then when you have lived that little bit longer it makes sense, and Kafka is probably the one that will come closest, having travelled quite nicely into the modern world and having a corporate version that most people will run into. Next is the dystopias that we see on the news but don't recognise when living in.

I've yet to be able to reach a human at Amazon about counterfeit items sold on the platform, and my 15+ year old Amazon account was banned from leaving reviews after I left a bad review on an Amazon Basics purchase of a surge protector that didn't do what it was supposed to and fried some of my electronics.

Yes, I would have guessed that complaining something is sold on the platform wouldn't get you very far, that's way outside the range of a typical customer support rep. They have a place to report IP infringement, and I suppose counterfeits would come under that umbrella, but it's for the rights holders only to use. Not customers who might have purchased one or noticed one listed.

For standard run of the mill customer support they're still pretty great. I was shopping for new wireless earbuds last fall and tried out a few different ones. 2 of the 3 were defective and I didn't like the third-- they hurt my ears to wear them.

For the two defective ones, I'm not sure why but the normal return button wasn't available and I had to go through chat support. I explained they were defective and I wanted to return them. They told me they'd issue the refund, no need to actually mail them back, so I didn't have to go through that hassle. And these were high end ear buds, a total of $400 worth of tech.

I have on of the not-sought-after Horowitz and Hill CE (counterfeit editions) [1]. Amazon was like, "lol, that was a marketplace purchase, no refund!" even though I just clicked "buy it now, prime shipping!" from the main product page.

Amazon sucks. It should be broken up.

[1] https://artofelectronics.net/the-book/counterfeit-editions/

Do you expect customer service representatives to evaluate your legal claim?

I expect them to listen to my non-legal-code claim of "this is the wrong product".

What a weird assumption.

I expect them to at least collect the information that I received, or suspect I have, a counterfeit item, when I go for a return. They don't even bother to do that.

While we're on the subject of Kafka: I've recently listened through an audiobook of ‘The Process’, and it turned out to be a new edition. Because apparently the original order of the chapters is not known, and Max Brod took some editorial liberties—so in this new recompilation, at least some semblance of a logical ordering is attempted.

It's important, though, to not listen to the introduction for too long, because it gives away the ending.

Not when it comes to an account ban. You become a pariah to support lines.

And there’s no shortage of real people defending this behavior because “they’re a private company and they can do whatever they want.”

So, if I run a website, or a service, and there are people who abuse my service, and I can't take actions to protect myself and my other paying customers...I should be forced to allow those malicious actors an account and do what?

You can ethically take blocking actions just fine if you allow for due process. The mere existence of bans is not what's being criticized. (Though I'd say bans generally shouldn't be lifetime either.)

This hypothetical glosses over an essential missing element. The site owner is in control of gating who enters into a transactional relationship with their site or service.

Offering a false dichotomy between "be forced to allow those malicious actors an[d, sic] account" and "take actions to protect myself and my other paying customers" that have adverse impacts (many times with severe monetary damages) is externalizing the cost of poor gating control in the first place in the pursuit of pumping up subscriber numbers chasing the next funding round or quarterly call to brag upon. This is similar to financial services institutions flailing around "identity theft" to cover for gating control of their transactions implemented in pursuit of transaction liquidity over security.

Both take the externalized costs out of customer hides as both uncompensated time and monies spent to make good on unwinding transactions, and in making the aggregate customers pay for the direct costs of fixing the problematic transactions on the way, way back end. Both are a result of implementing poor security practices.

Both also will not scale to the coming era of hyper-converged global financial services. First mover advantage accrues to the one who fixes this challenge at the front end where they gate the transactions, cutting out the majority of the costs of fixing this on the back end after the transaction has been compiled and deployed into production so to speak, not coincidentally speeding up settlement, increasing liquidity, and grab the significant network effects that come with establishing such an infrastructure.

Not to mention that there's a significant difference between just some website and a trillion+ dollar company with significant monopoly power in multiple markets. Being banned from Google or Amazon is simply not equivalent to being banned from commenting on some travel blog.

Talk about missing their whole point.

This is basically a digital version of Kafka's The Trial, and is just as aburdist because it kind of really happens

Not exactly what you describe, but I saw this in theaters and thought it did a great job of showing the horrors that these humanless systems can create.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnbDNv3uAl0

https://youtu.be/EvyiWg3qCPw

There is an element of this idea in The Net (1995)[0]. A computer programmer finds her life has been turned upside down by a hacker after she accidentally uncovers a conspiracy.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/

Not quite what you describe, but in this short film Utopia, similar themes are explored - exclusion from society due to non-compliance with the "digital lifestyle."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJYaXy5mmA8

This is why niche products and small businesses can succeed

The value of an auction site relates to the number of users it has, so it's difficult for a competitor to appear and dislodge it.

Stuff like this is an example of the failure of the market, because it's market wide and it's not like a service that actually puts labor into handling cases will find an advantage in the market and thus there is no incentive for it. This is a place where regulation actually makes sense.

My company avoids Google Cloud and uses their competitors for exactly this reason - it's a business risk to depend on Google for anything.

On the consumer side it would be hard to market the advantage though because everyone thinks it won't won't happen to them (and as long as they are average enough, it probably won't), and the cost of being banned from eBay is not that big if you're just a casual user.

Thanks for posting this article. My mind is completely blown. I just have one question for those reading this.

>> so it’s possible that eBay has been scanning customers’ computers for almost seven years without too many people noticing.

Can't one check the archive.org for signup.ebay.com & verify this? Saying ebay has been port-scanning for 7 years and proving so, would be a much stronger point. Surprised the OP did not check.

Similar thing happened to me with Offerup - which is MILITANT about not using VPN's.

They banned me and no recourse/way to appeal.

I even sent them a physical letter without much luck.

Pitty, I loved the app, but stopped using it due to their unnecessary/strict no-VPN rule.

This is every company that deals with fraud of some sort. They collect evidence. Once evidence is damning enough, they ban, without giving any information. If they were to give out their evidence, then their evidence collection methods would become known and would no longer be effective.

Furthermore, even when they get it right, people who were banned correctly come on to the internet to complain.

But sometimes they get it wrong. And the only recourse seems to be a public shaming online.

I doubt this is the full story.

While there is surely more to it, this kind of scenario should have been predicted before Internet companies got big. You see, the company can lose real money if there actually is a legal issue with an account holder and they don't act; they can be implicated in crime and be fined and have to spend money on attorneys to sort it out. However, it costs the company absolutely nothing to find, using automation, all complaints against any account holder valid and instaban them. It's cold, hard business. Everyone accused is punished without any resources spent on investigation to discover the truth. The truth here doesn't matter to the company. People don't matter to the company. Only money matters.

So we should start accusing all the biggest sellers until somebody does something more useful?

No. Business should be regulated to protect the consumer and remove this incentive for businesses to unilaterally screw the consumer.

The current situation is screwing a small number of unlucky consumers, but providing a net benefit for the overall aggregate of consumers, due to lower prices and fees.

What your proposing is to screw consumers overall in order to provide fairer treatment for the unlucky few due to ebay having to charge much higher fees in order to cover the cost of fraudsters.

Since buying and selling goods and services online is not a constitutional right, or any right anywhere as far as I know, a proposal to force such a change does not seem like it will pass muster in a serious court of law.

I'm not a lawyer but even to my untrained eye you will need far better arguments to get any traction.

Imagine if our justice system worked like this, where you could get convicted without ever seeing the evidence against you because it would reveal the methods the police used.

I realize it’s not entirely the same thing, but it’s also not entirely different.

Traffic and as speeding tickets almost work the same way

You can contest them in court and demand that evidence is shown. That's not almost the same at all.

You can but at least in the last state I lived, a cop's guesstimation is accepted (they count in their head or watch and count the lines or something, or that's the theory). In practice if the cop used an uncalibrated speed gun or whatever he'll always just say it was his guesstimation and precedent holds that the preponderance of the evidence shows that the ticket is valid.

So it returns back to the evidence being hidden and parallel construction being used to present the court case.

I honestly think that's still better than most online bans. If you find out you were ticketed because a cop had a bad day, it's not justice, but at least it's closure. Now you know, and you can accept it or fight/appeal if you're so inclined.

If you're permabanned because of a google/ebay AI bug, you can't even get that far.

Not sure if this is your intention or even what jurisdiction you’re talking about, but “a preponderance of the evidence” is a fancy way of saying “to a civil standard” ie “more likely than not”. Seems unlikely for a criminal offence, where that’s never the standard. It was probably a fair bit more complicated than you’re making out.

> in some states, minor traffic violations aren't considered "crimes"—they're "civil" offenses. So, in these states, the government might be held to a lesser standard of proof for traffic cases. For example, in New York, the standard of proof for traffic violations is "clear and convincing evidence." And in Oregon, the state needs to prove traffic offenses only by a "preponderance of the evidence."

Those are the literal words spoken by the judge the last time I challenged a speeding case. I was also forced to testify against myself and told clearly and specifically by the judge I had no fifth amendment right to remain silent.

[admittedly that challenge happened in a different state than the guesstimation state. I don't even bother to challenge in the guesstimation state because you're basically fucked no matter what.]

The judge's explanation to me was that any offense without possible jail time are held to preponderance of the evidence and constitutional rights such as 5th amendment are revoked.

I've also been called to show up in a 'Mayors court' for speeding where the mayor who is the cousin of the cop oversees your case. Good luck with that; the ACLU has actually done a pretty extensive documentation on Mayor's courts and the corruption involved there.

The 5th amendment (or rather the 14th in this case) requires "due process" before taking your life, liberty, or property.

As is probably intuitive, the process that is "due" for taking property, which is less than is "due" for taking liberty, which is still somewhat less than is "due" for taking life. (This latter hasn't always been the case, but read Brennan's concurrence in Furman v. Georgia and progeny cases establishing the death-is-different axiom of American criminal jurisprudence.)

A property interest that doesn't implicate any liberty interest may be taken with a bare minimum of due process, often just notice and an opportunity to be heard. If a hearing is granted, the standard is a preponderance (not beyond a reasonable doubt).

I assume the penalty for your speeding ticket was a fine only, yes?

Due process utterly failed to save the lives of the unconvicted and unindicted American citizens Anwar al-Awlaki, his 16-year-old son, (both blown up by remote control) or his 8-year-old daughter (shot in the neck), all three murdered under constitutionally indefensible Presidential order. None of the principals or co-conspirators has yet been prosecuted.

You're right, it was a fine only.

Personally I disagree that property doesn't implicate liberty. I toiled for hours, perhaps days to pay these fines. I was deprived of liberty for however long I was forced to labor to pay the fine. Also it's worth noting the citation itself was filed against me specifically, not my property. This is in contrast to something like 'US vs $500 on a dashboard.'

But yes I do understand the legal system treats these cases distinctly.

There's people that argue they shouldn't have to pay income tax because wages from labor is an exchange of life duration for money, so it should be a sale of assets and not pure income.

So just think of the fine as a forced liquidation, so it's back to property again.

De jure it is more complicated, de facto, not so much.

> Imagine if our justice system worked like this, where you could get convicted without ever seeing the evidence against you because it would reveal the methods the police used.

That exists and it’s just as prone to abuse as you think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...

Also the US No Fly List.

Also the Disposition Matrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix

That's actually how it works though. See "Parallel Construction".

Except instead of saying "Access Denied" which immediately makes you suspicious and comment on the internet, they construct an alternative evidence chain so you waste your effort defending against the wrong thing, and the true techniques never come into question.

This is the difference between public and private entities.

However when a monopoly starts to take over, what is a private entity starts to have governmental powers.

In the US, there has been a century long politics effort to reduce anti-monopoly protections, to the point that the standard is now "are consumers being actively harmed in pricing" and what you experience would likely never be considered something that could now result in anti-monopoly action.

And without those anti-monopoly protections, eBay gets to collect economic rents—pure economic waste that profits eBay and hurts everyone else.

We need a return to Georgism to help fight some really bad politics that have developed over the past century.

In the justice system of most western countries, the general trend is: "Rather 10 criminals who go free, than one innocent person behind bars".

To live up to that statement, society pays. Through the nose - letting criminals walk free is annoying, we do pay the cost of trying to find them, and we pay a large cost gathering evidence to make it stick in court even when e.g. the cops are 80% sure. Courts are very expensive; judges have a salary. As a society we pay this, because, well, take the frustration of OP and now imagine the penalty is not 'banned from ebay', it's 'in jail for life' or even just 'most employers will no longer employ you because criminal record'.

eBay could choose to pay these costs. It will mean:

* Paying for a tribunal of sorts, paying to have them set up procedures and checking that they live up to them.

* Accepting that most fraudsters will just go 'free'.

* Accepting that fraudsters who do get 'caught', still spend a lot of time 'free' whilst the laborious process runs its course.

* To manage fraudsters, rules are created and publicised which interfere with legitimate business to some extent; everybody on the platform will have to deal with the fact they can no longer do this. (Laws that oversimplify - in society parlance: Walking through a red light even when there are clearly no cars at all is still illegal; that anybody can clearly see it was safe to do this doesn't change either the fact that you could be ticketed for this offense, or that police should just arbitrarily let this go).

In this case, 'society' becomes 'ebay users'. Do ebay users want to carry the burden of this cost? In any case, ebay users carry the burden of paying for the salaries of eBay's board which may well be excessive.

Why isn't there an ebay alternative? One that is more expensive for buyers and sellers but has all this? In large part, network effect makes it infeasible to have many ebay-esques out there. None of them would be any good at that point, and/or you get services that make it easy to post to all of them.

> In the justice system of most western countries, the general trend is: "Rather 10 criminals who go free, than one innocent person behind bars".

> To live up to that statement, society pays. … As a society we pay this, because, well, take the frustration of OP and now imagine the penalty is not 'banned from ebay', it's 'in jail for life' or even just 'most employers will no longer employ you because criminal record'.

Aren't you describing a cost that is alleviated by (allegedly) making sure that the innocent aren't imprisoned, or, rather, a cost that would be borne if the legal system made sure to imprison those whom "the cops are 80% sure" were guilty?

> * Accepting that most fraudsters will just go 'free'.

But already go free, there is staggering ammount of fraud, counterfeit, stolen and illegal goods on Ebay.

Their system is more like "10,000 criminals who go free, 15 random people get banned and the person who wrote the algorythm get a raise and no-one measures the amount of crime or gives a shit"

My wife got banned from some service a year or so ago. I asked her if she complained, she said no. I thought to myself, “well, I bet those spam-stats are going to look great this quarter.”

It seems to be fairly rare for there to be a way to complain. They often make you log in to file a support ticket, but you can't log in anymore.

I suspect most of these companies have no real idea what their false positive rate is.

And even if there is a way to complain, unless they take action to reverse the decision it's probably not considered a false positive. And most complaints probably achieve nothing.

> Accepting that most fraudsters will just go 'free'.

I think part of the problem is that even if eBay is willing to spend a lot more money on this process, everyday buyers will blame them whenever something goes wrong and just stop using it altogether. Basically, they want to be seen as an alternative to Amazon and don't want buyers to ever think about risk. The sophisticated users are already aware of it and are very skeptical, but the newer users who never read or leave reviews make them money too.

There are two sides to every fraud. So if 75% of suspected/accused fraudsters go free, on the other side is a ton of buyers/sellers who got scammed. And to top it off the word gets around that you can scam on eBay and almost certainly get off with it.

eBay can try to make people whole who claim to be defrauded. But in addition to being expensive that creates its own perverse incentives.

I have several hundred EBay transactions over the last 15 years, probably 99 buys for every sale.

In the past few years, EBay has gotten very good at being pro-buyer (which is good for me). I can think of 2 transactions in the last 3 years that were “enough not as described” for me to bother to complain. In both instances, the sellers immediately offered something reasonable and we all moved on with our lives. (I think both sellers were clueless as to the defects, being high-volume churners of resold tech.)

It might be the case that EBay is more buyer friendly than Amazon at this point.

This reflects my experience as well. Same with Paypal. As a buyer when I have had issues, those issues have all been resolved to my satisfaction after going through the dispute process.

I dislike Paypal as a company and they do a lot of shitty things but the benefit to me using their services is tangible.

Honestly even sites like Aliexpress and Banggood have always resolved issues to my satisfaction once a dispute has been filed.

Almost all fraudsters on eBay already go free, at least in certain circumstances. I have reported numerous, obvious fake items in categories I'm familiar with to eBay, and had virtually none removed.

Have you heard of facebook marketplace, esty, shopify? EBay doesn't have the monopoly it once did.

People go to court for murder yes but they also go for smaller things like a neighbour's tree causing property damage. The cost are different.

Companies that force users to give up the ability to sue need to provide an alt system.

"Rather 10 criminals who go free, than one innocent person behind bars"

This is not how things work outside of tv and talk radio. 1/3 of people in jail are innocent. Cops being sure doesn't make a fact true. Everyone has different priorities and cops are extremely good at jumping to simple answers because this is in their collective interest.

EBay is still where you turn for random things that few people need. Baby toys can sell on Facebook, but parts for an obsolete computer are valuable to the right person and worthless to everyone else.

Amazon is the place for rare things few people need these days.

Selling things where you need the perfect partner are not things that sell well through an auction. An auction is 7 days where you hope to get many people interested in your unique product. An obsolete computer is better on a shelf with a price tag available all year until it sells.

And yet eBay remains the biggest marketplace of obsolete computers.

Yeah you can sell like that on eBay. Most things aren't auctions.

Amazon is absolutely terrible for anything used or where minor variations matter (e.g. collectors items) as they will just combine all listings into one with a generic image. Useless for many things that eBay covers.

I'm hearing a lot more people talking about selling stuff via Nextdoor.

If you want something old school web 1.0, https://www.car-part.com/ for junk yard parts.

> In the justice system of most western countries, the general trend is: "Rather 10 criminals who go free, than one innocent person behind bars".

As someone with almost a decade of experience in the criminal justice system in the USA, it is pretty much the exact opposite. Of the dozens of prosecutors I know, I can't think of a single one that would care if someone is innocent of the crime for which they are charged.

Yep. The really messed up part is that normal people who end up in court are often punished more harshly than professional criminals. It's insane to see guys go to jail with long sentences for driving on a suspended license, while habitual offenders and scofflaws get slaps on the wrist.

This is very true. If you go to jail often you know the things that can help to get your case settled out quickly for a low plea.

So, it seems that you know better than Blackstone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio even though, as others have commented in response, the current American system does not follow the principle.

You have a vastly incorrect understanding of ths topic. I highly suggest you read some criminal justice theory for your own good. Instead feel free to DV and remain ignorant.

Well you have a choice in e-commerce marketplaces. You don’t have a choice in justice systems.

eBay does not have a monopoly on violence.

Well yes and no. In the UK ebay has a monopoly. There are no other marketplaces that offer the same services and the same reach. That is why it should be regulated.

Read Kafka's The Trial [1], nice description of how it feels to be a person living in such system.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial

Just a reminder that Kafka's book like The Trial and The Castle are based on his experience working within the Hapsburg Empire bureaucracy. He wasn't imagining some nightmare world so much as documenting it.

I wasn't arrested, repeatedly seduced by a barrage of women with ulterior motives, or killed by the government, so my story would make a terrible novel, but this is how I felt dealing with the government as the executor of a family member's estate.

After I grieved for some time and taken sentimental items, her house had fallen into disrepair, so I sold it at a loss to an investor, and I was mostly ready to start moving on with my life. Somehow, the death certificate provided to me by the government about a year prior to this did not indicate that the government was aware of her death, and I needed send them back a copy of that very certificate in order to make the government officially aware of what happened.

Then I was told that I would need to wait six months for the estate process to end. During that time, I was given random tasks to do at no set interval, usually with deadlines of only a couple days. Then literally one day before the six month time period was over, I was told that the government would be taking the money in the estate due to unpaid medical bills from some years before her death (the same trips to the hospital that had failed to diagnose her illness in the first place). After getting more lawyers to investigate whether this was possible and correct (it was, private creditors' time limit starts at the time of death, but government's time limit starts whenever the aforementioned paperwork is filed (also this only took me a day or so to figure out, because I do not enjoy long drawn out bureaucratic processes unlike the state government I was interacting with)), I resigned to give up and give them the money.

However, that was not an option either. It took ANOTHER six months of random tasks to actually give them the money. I honestly don't remember what most of the tasks were, because none of it made any sense, but the final task really summed up the whole process. I received a call on a Thursday afternoon: I had to mail a physical check to my lawyer to then hand-deliver to a department within seven days, but that department was only open on Mondays 10AM to noon.

All for the terrible crime of having a family member die without having memorized estate law ahead of time. I do consider what they did some unnecessary abstract form of violence/coercion, because otherwise I obviously would not have voluntarily signed up to do any of that shit. At least if they had been honest enough to tell me at the start they were planning to just take everything, I would've just declined to be the executor and let the government do what it wanted with the property. They could have had that money (probably more money, since I wouldn't have paid a third of it to an estate lawyer and the house would've been in better condition) close to two years earlier and left me alone at the same time.

My Uncle-in-law is literally going through this process right now. There’s literally nothing left for the family despite so much being left to it. It’s mind-blowing how land that has been passed down for generations just goes “poof.” Meanwhile, had the family member known they were going to pass away, they could have just sold the land for a token amount and it wouldn’t have been part of the estate.

It's cruel, it's slow, and it's a game you don't realize you're playing (until you've done it once I guess, not looking forward to the next time(s)).

And these are two fine examples of why if you have anything at all, you want to put as much of it as possible in a trust. Properly constructed and administered, this will avoid all of the above sort of nonsense related to estate probate processes, properly avoid many taxes and processes, keep it all non-public (probate in inherently public), and greatly reduce the burden on your family/successors. Find a GOOD Trust & Estates attny (not just a rando hanging out a shingle, of which there are many), having an LLM degree in T&E is a good sign. Is not necessarily that expensive, and if you have any significant house equity, etc., and especially that with children, it's a very good idea.

After watching it all play out, I’d find it hard to have convinced this person to do that. They grew up in a world where debt wasn’t a thing that could send you to poverty, rather a useful tool. When they inherited the land, there wasn’t much, if any debt. Today, most people have debt as a means of survival vs. a tool. This makes setting up a trust harder in their eyes because they might need the assets for more debt.

No idea how any of this works, just 2am shower thoughts.

Yup, convincing people of how it really works is often an insurmountable obstacle, especially when, as you pointed out, the world has massively changed within a lifetime (heck, even trying to figure out how it all works for ourselves is hard enough)...

> I realize it’s not entirely the same thing

It is absolutely the same thing.

You have no constitutional right in the US to see any of the evidence against you before trial.

And where I am in Illinois, until a couple of years ago, if you were held in a county jail awaiting trial you were prohibited by law from having a copy of any of the evidence against you.

> Imagine if our justice system worked like this

Imagine if our justice system had to operate at a profit.

eBay isn't operating as a democratically endowed, taxpayer-funded operation for the public commonwealth. They're just a company trying to make a buck. It turns out, if you want to make a buck by providing market-making services to third parties, you become a huge magnet for scams and fraud. And you need to deal with that. This is how it works.

If you really got what you seem to want, it would be a government-regulated online market. And... let's be honest, that would probably be much worse for the buyers (who are the targets of fraud, remember) than eBay ever has been.

So pretty much China. The methods used should be as vague as possible so that anyone could be convicted when convenient. Keeps the fear factor up.

A law professor in my country just recently stated that proactive bans on online platforms are not a problem. My country is known for being digitally underdeveloped but I was still surprised that you can refrain from touching grass so effectively.

Yep. OP's only real recourse is to just try again in 6 months or a year or whatever and hope that their ML algorithm evaluates their data differently.

If Ebay gave a credit report-style summary saying "you're banned because you're associated with this IP range" or something, then indeed this becomes information that would be exploited by fraudsters. If OP is actually innocent then their being banned is considered an acceptable risk.... one can only hope that in future model training though that this ban would be considered a false positive.

>> They collected a ton of my sensitive information (address, phone, bank account, etc)

> Yep. OP's only real recourse is to just try again in 6 months or a year or whatever and hope that their ML algorithm evaluates their data differently.

And what change their identity? They already have their PII and banned them for life.

Literally just use different spelling or ordering of names. Change address slightly or use a PO box, work address, relative house. New bank account etc. If they got the social that may be the sticking point, but I'm not even sure of that.

> If they were to give out their evidence, then their evidence collection methods would become known and would no longer be effective.

I would like to dispute this. Of course, there is a cat-and-mouse game between popular online services and fraudsters, but the argument "if we show you the methods we use to spot them, they won't become effective" is a flawed argument. Sure, it helps a little, but after some time many of these just become public knowledge anyway.

I know if I like too many photos on Instagram, they will block me temporarily, and if I repeat it within certain period, they can ban me for a few days and so on. Having these thresholds and other rules spelled out would be helpful to users. They would know what to avoid, and if they misbehave, they can be rightfully punished. Giving blows out of the thin air is simply unfair.

> I know if I like too many photos on Instagram, they will block me temporarily, and if I repeat it within certain period, they can ban me for a few days and so on. Having these thresholds and other rules spelled out would be helpful to users

It would be far more helpful to spammers, who could then set all their bots to send threshold - 1 likes and invitations than the average user who rarely ever considers liking enough stuff to trigger it (and is able to take the hint and just not like stuff as much if they do get a warning). Plus in practice it's probably not just a simple threshold, but a function weighted by timing and topics and relatedness of accounts and which is completely unintelligible to the average person (but potentially informative to more advanced spambot developers).

Then make the thresholds low enough so that spam bots are totally ineffective by staying below the threshold.

If you lower the threshold far enough you'll also hit some of the most active users.

True, but they’ll know exactly what’s up.

Do you not think these limits are being tested and shared already? I ran into a temporary ig ban when getting rid of a number of people I followed. When I searched for answers the limits were everywhere being discussed.

Before bug bounty programs this was the reason given for not disclosing security issues. All it did was keep the issues underground not fixed and allowed security bugs to exist forever.

It's also a rather unconvincing argument when there are so many blatant instances of service abusers getting away with it on platforms that can afford very talented employees. In short, whatever it is they're doing is already quite ineffective. While in theory it could be a little more ineffective if we knew what they were doing, it's also possible that they could be a lot more effective if they changed what they're doing and were transparent about it. A hierarchical reputation system (vouching or invite-style) would solve many issues in many domains, for instance; its main downside is during hyper-growth phases where you need onboarding to be as frictionless as possible. But for a big established company like ebay, I think requiring a new account to be vouched for by an existing account which takes on some risk if the new one turns abusive would be quite doable.

At least in your IG example the ban is finite. I don't want the law to be used so bluntly but I'd really prefer if all bans had to be time limited, even if only technically where due to exponential scaling for repeat offenses the time exceeds expected human lifespans.

> If they were to give out their evidence, then their evidence collection methods would become known and would no longer be effective

Companies can give the exact reason for a ban at least, without disclosing the methods of deduction. There is absolutely no reason to hide this information.

Such a behavior of companies is a big "f*ck you" to democracy and justice, not to criminals. It's exactly how totalitarianism looks like.

The exact reason is probably that their ML model told them to. They probably have no ability to give a more satisfying answer.

I don't think their model just says them "fraud/no fraud". There are different types of fraud, which should be written in their TOS.

No, this is not how these systems work. You're correct that they don't say "fraud/no fraud" but they generate a score (like a credit score) based on a massive number of inputs, and there are thresholds over which action (account ban, etc.) is taken. It does not in any way map to "types of fraud" and it does not map to the TOS. It's about identifying activity or accounts that look sufficiently similar to previous bad actors.

> It's exactly how totalitarianism looks like..

Ofcourse it does, a corporation is a totalitarian organisation by design - I don't understand why anyone is surprised to learn this. Any disobedience or herecy and you are removed with prejudice.

I still wish some Congress person would introduce a consumer fairness act that required companies to give the specific evidence and reason for any service ban if the company has over 100,000 users. I don't think the security implications override the current level of abuse.

It's difficult though; giving the reason would directly lead to an explosion of fraud, because you are telling the fraudsters exactly what they screwed up and how to avoid the ban next time.

Anti-fraud is basically all smoke and mirrors; if you reveal the methods it doesn't work any more.

They have abused their need to conceal methods by not having proper customer service to resolve situations where innocent people are banned. Internet and banking services are too important to our lives, much like utilities, to allow this abuse to continue. If they wanted secret methods, then they needed to provide adequate customer service to offset their failures.

If the human customer service provides an off-ramp from being banned, then the fraudsters will use that too. So the question still boils down to the exact same thing in the end: how do you reliably tell the difference between the fraudsters and the legitimate customers?

Don't know, not my area, but like every other business in the US that cost should be born by the business not the consumer. Don't push large groups of people to the thin ice if you don't want laws passed.

There is another recourse, which is legislation. Contact your representatives and let them know that the integrity of eBay's evidence collection methods should be eBay's problem to deal with, and not their customers'.

What about taking them to court?

For what? They have the right to refuse service.

This runs into two problems:

1) It's a private company, they can refuse service to anyone for any reason - this is spelled out in the TOS:

> If we believe you are abusing eBay and/or our Services in any way, we may, in our sole discretion and without limiting other remedies, limit, suspend, or terminate your user account(s) and access to our Services, delay or remove hosted content, remove any special status associated with your account(s), remove, not display, and/or demote listings, reduce or eliminate any discounts, and take technical and/or legal steps to prevent you from using our Services.

> Additionally, we reserve the right to refuse, modify, or terminate all or part of our Services to anyone for any reason at our discretion.

2) There is a mandatory arbitration clause in the TOS so you can't take them to court.

> You and eBay each agree that any and all disputes or claims that have arisen, or may arise, between you and eBay (or any related third parties) that relate in any way to or arise out of this or previous versions of the User Agreement, your use of or access to our Services, the actions of eBay or its agents, or any products or services sold, offered, or purchased through our Services shall be resolved exclusively through final and binding arbitration, rather than in court.

I don't like it but that's how it is. For some reason no one - right, left or center - seems interested in regulating these things.

> If they were to give out their evidence, then their evidence collection methods would become known and would no longer be effective.

Doesn't this argument apply to the criminal justice system?

This is why i lost $400 thanks to dumbasses like you

I noticed your amount was in pounds. If you are in the UK, you could try a "Subject Access Request" which legally requires them to hand over all relevant personal info that they hold about you. People sometimes get lucky with these and it may include any comments that have been made about you internally. You can find out more about that here:

https://ico.org.uk/your-data-matters/your-right-to-get-copie...

And if you do get that somehow please post it, I think a lot of people would find it interesting

But the OP may not find it 'interesting'. I guess he told us only half of the story.

The last time I tried to sell something on eBay, it was an RX 490 card. A buyer with an obviously fake profile pic clicked the "Buy It Now" button, and then shortly after I received a forged PayPal payment confirmation email with links to .ru domains. The shipping address was one of those international drop-shipping places in New Jersey (to get around the "only shipping to US addresses" restriction). So basically, total obvious scam.

I collected the evidence and submitted a report to eBay's fraud department. After the required waiting time I submitted a nonpayment report and got a credit on my eBay account about a week later. It took another 2 months to get a check because they told me that they were having operational issues because of the pandemic. A year later I checked to see if the scam account was still active, and sure enough it was.

Not sure how blatantly obvious scammers who get detailed reports of faudulent activity reported to eBay's fraud department manage to keep their accounts active, but it seems kind of impressive.

How? Because nobody works there. The scammer knows how to avoid the AI, and the humans have been fired ages ago

I got banned from eBay as well. I bought a part for my dishwasher and received a counterfeit part. I collected evidence, posted the photos, and requested a return. Next thing you know my account is banned. I think the seller reported me in retaliation.

I have no idea where to go next time I need something. AliExpress would probably be even worse when it comes to counterfeits.

In my experience, Aliexpress takes claims seriously and is on the side of the customer.

I actually like Aliexpress, but I wouldn't expect them to sell parts for American market appliances. I searched now for the old part I needed, and I see "fits <model#>" and "compatible with <model#>" but not the genuine part. Call me old fashioned but I'll pay an extra $20 for first-party components.

Call me old fashioned but I'll pay an extra $20 for first-party components.

...which are made in China, probably in the same factories contracted by the original manufacturer. Aliexpress just lets you cut out the middleman.

You don't know that for certain though. I'd rather pay extra if an appliance is broken, than wait for a gamble on what may or may not be a decent replacement.

You're old fashioned.

In my experience, I ordered a fake USB3 capture card (https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001773724519.html, check the 1-star reviews, also debunked by Marcan at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30906127), filled out comprehensive documentation of it being fake USB3 and unable to capture stable footage at 1080p60, and AliExpress sided with the seller. I had to file a chargeback to get money back for the fraudulent product (and I hear chargebacks can be reversed by the seller, not sure if it happened to me).

Chargebacks can only be contested by the merchant if they have enough evidence you talk your bank into reversing.

For what it’s worth, I have successfully reversed a chargeback. I had a customer who ordered a downloadable product then did a chargeback. I presented evidence that they clicked the unique link for their download and the email exchange we had about the product. That seemed sufficient to satisfy the card processor.

This can happen. We won a lot of chargebacks as a seller, but it’s a huge hassle that you really don’t want to deal with.

That is absolutely not my experience. During the height of the pandemic, many AliExpress sellers failed to deliver orders. The tracking numbers that some sellers provided showed "delivered" even when the item never arrived. During the disputes, AliExpress would request proof that the item never arrived, which is not possible to provide. Filing a chargeback or PayPal dispute is only an option if you don't mind being banned by AliExpress.

eBay and Amazon Marketplace put the burden of proof of delivery on the seller instead of the buyer when the shipment is not protected with signature confirmation. Many AliExpress-style items are also listed on eBay and Amazon at similar prices, and I've mostly switched over after my bad experiences with AliExpress. AliExpress still has a different selection of items, so I haven't stopped using it completely.

Ehm, nope. Unless your complaint is a very obvious one (i.e. seller didn't send anything at all or the item has visibly not been delivered from the tracking info), good luck.

E.g. I had obviously fake EEPROM chips delivered, they weren't even new (they contained data from the previous use!). I have opened a dispute, posted the evidence that the chips are relabeled fakes - and promptly got it rejected both first time and on appeal. The grunt handling it had absolutely no idea what my complaint was about, I have received my goods, so what more do I want?

Fortunately it was only a few euros worth so not big deal - I have opened the dispute mostly to point out that the seller is a fraudster, not to recover my 15€ or so back. Tough luck ...

Over the years I had more luck sorting complaints out on AliExpress directly with the sellers because they are afraid of losing their ratings and thus a large portion of business (people usually sort by price and then by ratings). The support staff is hopeless in these cases.

If this is recent, please file a chargeback with your bank. That's the only way to deal with such scum, otherwise they've still won - the scammer got their money and eBay got their commission.

The only thing that matters is money and this is why these bans are a thing - it's cheaper to screw some customers over than to have a competent human analyze the situation. Hitting them in the wallet is the only place they'd actually feel it.

The interesting thing is I still got refunded, about a week after my account was banned. Their backend must be a total mess, but it worked out in my favor somehow. If not for that I definitely would have done a chargeback.

> Their backend must be a total mess

The URL structures on the website are scary and indeed suggest the backend is a horrible dumpster fire.

Not only a mess but they seem to have been halfway through modernising things for years.

They built a new API but are probably never going to be able to get rid if the old one.

Can confirm, been working with many eBay APIs for a while now and it's completely and totally a massive dumpster fire. Most API versions are in the thousands, and there's so many random gotchas and contradicting docs and daily bugs and breakages you don't want to go anywhere near it. Not to mention their only recourse for contacting them about bugs or developer issues is via prepaid premium support, paid only via paypal, in which the link for it frequently goes down too. If you check their dev forums it's filled with nothing but people complaining about all sorts of random issues and never getting real responses.

The history of EBay is long (in internet commerce terms) and complicated. At one point 100s of millions of customers on a single oracle db. A colleague of mine was working on this around 1998/9

https://web.archive.org/web/20070104021557/http://www.addsim...

The terrible quality of their APIs does suggest it's a mess behind as well yeah.

Kinda makes me wonder if the person handling the case on their end got confused and banned the wrong party.

This is what I did in a very similar predicament. They sent me to collections after the chargeback and dinged my credit.

This only works if your bank is on your side. I asked for a chargeback with my bank at the time (Square) for a fraudulent transaction and they terminated my account.

Thankfully, banks in general are in a stricter regulatory environment with a government-level watchdog you can escalate to, though that might not apply for electronic money institutions (or whatever the US equivalent is).

No, why do people think this? In the US banks have a right to refuse to do business with you for (almost) any reason and refuse they do. They are more likely to ban you than eBay. There's no right to have a bank account, there's no right to keep your back account - full stop.

This happened to me recently when American Express sided against me when Expedia essentially stole money from me for services it didn't deliver.

Now there's two companies I'll never do more business with.

Oh so far I've always found American Express to be much more reliable than all other banks when it comes to Chargebacks

Me to up until this incident. It's worth noting that AmEx has acquired some businesses from Expedia Group and Expedia Group itself is now a major shareholder in AmEx Global Business Travel.

I've also been permabanned from eBay. Buyer for 10+ years, occasional seller. Went to sell something alongside lots of listings for the same thing. Permabanned my account and my parent's accounts as I had logged in from their house previously. No recourse. "Banned without appeal" they called it. "Because of the nature of the ban we cannot tell you anything about it". Many frustrating calls.

Years later, my only thesis is it was due to having HTML in my product description, I linked to the vendor website. Maybe that's against the rules or something.

>To protect our members, listings or products can't contain links that direct customers to a site other than eBay, even if the link is not clickable.

I think they mean "to protect eBay's profits."

>Maybe that's against the rules or something.

Maybe you should read the rules for the service you are using?

I've received damaged products from AliExpress a handful of times and found their resolution team/procedures to be fantastic.

You can submit a claim which the seller responds to. If the seller doesn't respond fast enough, AE steps in and suggests a couple resolutions (usually something like a partial refund with no product return, or a full refund if you send the product back). You can then negotiate or just accept one of the suggestions. Absolutely 0 hassle or talking to a person. You click a few buttons and get your money back.

You wouldn't have been banned from eBay for a single return like this. It would have to be a pattern that makes you at least appear like an undesirable buyer.

It's absurdly easy to scam people on eBay as both the buyer and seller. They probably saw the pattern of a new account selling electronics in an amount equal to a month's wages in a lot of places and instabanned.

Back when I was selling a lot of electronics there they just had restrictions where you couldn't increase your volume much until after some successful purchases had gone through. I guess that was too easy to game and they've taken a harder stance?

If you do want to sell there eventually (sounds like you don't) you just need a new address, new IP, new cookies, new phone, new bank, .... As long as you're not actually scamming people and don't need true anonymity there are cheap/free services for all of those things that usually require some kind of personal information (so that if you do use them with nefarious intent the courts can find your real identity), and you'd just be violating eBay's terms and conditions. As you've seen though, adhering to their terms doesn't give any better personal outcomes, so I dunno that I'd give a flip about breaking them (not legal advice, please don't sue).

I’ve only sold three things and two of them the first buyer tried an obvious scam (asking for email to send fake PayPal payment notification, telling me they “couldn’t get their card to work on the eBay site”).

The first time eBay flagged it automatically and reversed the sale, the second I cancelled as buyer request since they told me they couldn’t pay.

The annoying thing is I had to manually restart the listing and ask eBay to override the selling cap so I could do so. It’s really annoying because they tie up the listing while waiting to see if you are that gullible or not.

Yeah, I hit something weird like this the one time I tried to sell something on eBay, too. A buyer bid on it, won the auction, then after-the-fact tried to back out. I’m not sure what the scam was, but I said no, and they paid and took the item. But it totally soured me on selling anything on eBay ever again. This was a low-cost item and the hassle of it all made the whole thing such a waste of time and effort.

When are we, as a society, going to take small crimes seriously?

My girlfriend got scammed out of over $1000 on Ebay recently (seller is within the country). Here was the dastardly scam: she ordered something, and the seller never sent it. Ebay would do nothing; the police would do nothing.

Why can you just take people's money like this?

Small claims court is always an option in the US

Serious question for HN: How do we replace eBay with a reliable, sensibly run public service?

It's extremely disheartening that it's now 2022 and we haven't figured out a way to replace eBay.

It's the most basic form of commerce. Select a product from the listings, check the seller's reputation based on how active the seller is, ask a few questions, finalize a transaction. On rare occasion, in some markets, adjudicate a dispute.

Everyone in the world should be able to have access to this service for essentially free.

eBay is such a basic thing that it was started as a hobby because of course people should be able to buy and sell online with minimal friction. It's obvious.

Why don't we make new things like this anymore?

I hear all this hype about the fediverse and web3 and crypto, but the reality is that the public cannot even reliably send messages to each other without invoking a big tech company.

Crypto barely works and there have been billions of dollars made and lost just trying to keep track of account balances.

It feels like we're forever away from having a well run public global market.

Uber and Twitter and Netflix and eBay and the rest of the "essential" services seem so basic, but we can't seem to get enough nerds together to start replacing them.

We're each individually globally connected with more bandwidth than I ever thought would fit in my pocket.

But I can't hail a ride without involving Uber.

I can't deliver a 140 character message to a lot of people without involving Twitter.

We can't crowdfund the creation of great art, unless we all pay Netflix to do it for us.

> Don’t use eBay.

And, as OP is soon to notice, it's very hard to sell used electronics without using eBay.

What can we actually do, today, as hackers, to replace eBay?

If I was actually going to do it, where would I start? Would replacing eBay be a government project, a web3 project, a federated network?

Is there actual hacktivism to be done here by simply replacing services with p2p equivalents without engaging in the current corporate system?

I've had enough of relying on companies for what should be human to human services.

I always thought Ebay's fundamental design error was that it did not serve as a true escrow agent.

Yes, that would have been difficult to scale, but then you'd not need a fraud department at all as both sides would be able to verify the transaction.

Seems like a business opportunity here.

Out of curiosity, how would an escrow agent work against malicious actors (without the law serving as a deterrent, since enforcement against online fraud is near non-existent)?

Scammers are already tricking PayPal's dispute system by sending real tracking numbers and sometimes even real packages but filled with bricks or other junk.

Imagine a situation where the buyer is malicious and claims they have received a brick. If you settle in favour of the buyer, sellers lose out, but if you settle in favour of the seller, buyers would lose out from scam sellers sending bricks instead of the promised goods.

A neutral party such as the shipping courier would have to act as a witness and unpack the goods on delivery to mitigate that, and even then it's not bulletproof if the goods have a defect that isn't immediately obvious.

Yeah, the neutral party needs to verify both ends of the transaction.

Good point about subtle defects. Hmm. That I do not have an answer for, especially if the seller is not aware.

Maybe it's just not possible to trust the Ferengixxx humans...

They had some eBay agents type thing a while back. I think they called it eBay concierge.

But something similar to a notary, could validate items if a certain value. I think they are doing this with sneakers and certain luxury goods.

An escrow service that would photograph the goods before shipping either party would go a long way automated mitigating the empty packages and Bricks. Certainly makes sense for a add-on for high price items.

I wonder if there is a market for this as a third-party service outside of eBay that works on their Market. It would double shipping cost and add time but that could be worth it for a class of goods

Stockx basically does that iirc, seller sends items to Stockx, stockx verifies the goods, puts it for sale and charge a relatively high commission once it's sold.

Sounds similar, but more like consignment than an escrow service.

Good to know, nonetheless

if your account is established enough not to trip whatever crude fraud algorithm they have, ebay is an extremely convenient and efficient way of buying and selling stuff. maybe its because ive done it for a while so im used to it, but im always suprised when people complain about ebay. i think you get into real trouble if you expect it to be 100% perfect, but if you just accept that every now you might get screwed and dont put all your eggs in one basket, it works very well.

I'm not sure account lifetime is a factor - on an old account I remember getting (very obvious) scam messages sent to me from long-established accounts that have presumably been compromised. If anything, account lifetime might work against you if you log in with an IP address or browser fingerprint that's too different from the account's history.

the problem is it can happen to anyone for just about any reason, you've just gotten lucky. meanwhile people who don't even use the platform as much as you get banned much quicker.

Check out OpenBazaar, it's more or less the idea you're describing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBazaar

P2P market places already exists, I guess. The tricky part is how parties can trust each other, and I think this might actually be solvable by blockchain / smart contract tech. Basically a smart contract takes the role of the trusted intermediary / escrow account. I believe this is being worked on (e.g. Nexus ASA on the Algorand blockchain).

serious answer: you don't. the idea that anybody should be able to sell to anybody else is fundamentally invalid. global-scale marketplaces are a bad idea, because as soon as money starts changing hands, then fraud becomes a risk and the sort of impersonal, evil-seeming anti-fraud actions that ebay takes become a necessity.

nobody has any inherent rights to selling on ebay. they do their analisys, and determine if you're a fraud risk worth taking on or not. and if they don't want to take on the risk of allowing you to use their platform, they ban you. just like they did to the OP here. it's not evil, it's just the only responsible behaviour for a global platform that allows anybody to sell anything to anybody else. Any other platform reaching eBay's scale will have to do the same thing.

Facebook marketplace can do a bit better, because facebook has an absolutely absurd amount of your personal information that they can mine to determine your fraud risk. Some other small-scale indie services can pretend to do better, but the only thing that allows them to do better is their small scale. Online classifieds like ebay's Kijiji subsidiary can do better because they don't handle the transaction, and you take on your own fraud risk and only deal in-person.

at some level, every service that does this has to answer the question of "how do we deal with fraud risk" and the answer to that always has to be forbidding some set of people from using the platform. better to do that by initially limiting the scope of the marketplace to something small, rather than kicking people out based on some criteria.

Right. The root cause is that Internet is a Dark Ocean, and any honest little fish that pipes up saying it would like to buy or sell a used iPhone is likely to be swiftly eaten by a shark.

So, how do we scale the creation of small market places?

again: just don't.

small communities of people who trust each other can sell things to each other without any VC-backed platforms getting involved. "scaling it" is the problem, but nobody needs that. all you need is a messageboard, either digital or a literal bulletin board. trying to force marketplaces to grow bigger causes problems.

No. eBay is very friendly and integrated with the US feds. Any market competitor that did not provide such a friendly and long established relationship would be regulated out of existence when it started to become a viable alternative.

It's not a technical problem, it's a legal one.

Because we have still not fixed "trust" on the internet. We're perpetually at the mercy of Sybil.

If you come to a small town and try and defraud the locals, you'll rapidly find yourself in jail, or worse. Small towns have local concepts of trust. Alice says you defrauded her, I trust Alice, that means I believe her. So I tell my friends, who trust me, and now we're coming for you. Just like that.

But online, there's no propagation of trust, I only have one source, and that's Ebay. Ebay's just not as good at trust as all of us working together.

So long as this dynamic is at play, as long as we can not propagate trust, then massive companies will dysfunctionally dominate.

They’ve actually gone mad.

I’ve got a bunch of extra hardware I’ve been trying to offload. 15 year old account and I log in to try and sell something and I can only sell 1 thing a month. If I had I’d created a new account I could sell 10, my past selling history is irrelevant.

Oh, and the ‘user’ who has won/bought my old iPhone X has now twice been someone with no sale history who hasn’t paid. Are they waiting for me to maybe ship it to them by accident? Insane

Yeah I get that a lot on eBay when selling stuff - zero feedback accounts with randomly generated names buying stuff and never paying then you have to wait weeks for eBay to do anything. #1 reason why I've stopped using it.

IMO, they're alts from other users that are trying to sell a similar item. I genuinely can't think of any other reason why this would be so widespread.

That’s interesting. For me it’s still the best way to determine the ‘market’ price and I also hate the idea using Facebook market

Sounds like high frequency trading...

I'd be willing to bet the whole thing is automated, so you might not be far off the mark there...

I went to buy something on eBay and found that my account had been suspended. I have never sold anything on eBay. However, I had signed up for an eBay developer account and then never used it because the client who I was exploring it for went another direction. So I thought maybe it was related to the unused developer account. The support person couldn't really tell me anything but said I could contact some part of support for an appeal so I asked that they send me an email with that process. They said yes, our chat is automatically emailed to me. But no email followed up that support experience.

Very poor support. No explanation and action including actions that are promised on their support page.

> I have some extra electronics around my house that I’d like to sell so I signed up for an eBay account. In one hour I posted 6 listings totaling less than 500GBP

Depending on the price of the items and how many, this is exactly what it looks like when someone opens an account to sell stolen electronics.

I sold my RX 580 for $400 (which I got for $120) during peak hysteria. eBay locked my account. I went through the process of explaining to support that I was selling it because gfx card prices were so high.

If they suspect stolen items they can suspend the account and require proof of purchase or extra ID verification (to make it as inconvenient and/or risky for a criminal) instead of just banning it forever with no explanation.

Probably not with the scale of frauds they receive. The fastest method is to auto-ban and analyze. Ebay did the right thing here, unfortunately, its popular amongst carders.

The latter is probably much more cost-effective.

ID could be faked or stolen credit cards can be used. In fact, dropshipping(ordering items on the fly, automatically, from a backend webstore - e.g. Amazon, Aliexpress, taobao) on stolen credit cards, or even pretending to do that without shipping part, is so prevalent there's a DEF CON talk[1] on that topic.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IT2oAzTcvU

Coincidentally it's exact what it looks like when someone opens an account to sell non-stolen electronics.

Yes, I was banned for something similar. I signed up to ebay and put a US$800 bid on an item, and got banned shortly afterwards. Weird. But I did get them to reinstate my account by using the online chat. When I sent an email request they said the ban was permanent and they couldn't do anything, but the online chat support person put me through to a "specialized team", who then reverted the ban.

I think the issue is just that their fraud detection is a bit ridiculous. If you want to buy used avionics, pretty much the only place you can do that is ebay, and everything is $500-1000 or thereabouts. I had never used ebay in the past 20 years, but if I want to fix my plane I'm kinda forced into it.

Dumbest fuvking reason. Keep legit sellers away

I was victim of fraud on e-bay. Someone opened up an account and pretended to be me. They opened yet another count as a fake seller.

They used my credit card information on the fake buyer account and paid the fake seller account.

The fake seller found a real tracking number to my city and marked it as shipped.

I filed a chargeback. E-bay would not let me file for a 'return' or claim because the account was not 'mine.' When e-bay received the chargeback they appealed that the account was actually mine and the tracking number was evidenced they received it. The e-mail given? Something like "arrrghpirate@hotmail.com" -- they taunted me.

Ebay shut down the fraudulent seller but fought tooth and nail against the chargeback. They overwhelmed me and my bank with paperwork until my bank gave up and threw up their hands. Ultimately my bank told me to go fuck myself and that ebay wins, even though the tracking number given was for an entirely different person and before even the date of the invoice.

Fuck e-bay.

> Ultimately my bank told me to go fuck myself and that ebay wins

The next step is to take it to small claims court, where the court doesn't really care what the bank wants and says "no, this is their money, and here's a nice hefty fine to convince you not to try this person again"

Yes you're correct.

Sadly This happened one week before a cross country move to a half of the country where there is no representation of this bank. It would have cost me as much in hotal and travel fees to fly back for the court dates as I would have recouped in the claim if I prevailed.

> Sadly This happened one week before a cross country move to a half of the country where there is no representation of this bank

That is their problem, not yours. Open the case and let them send staff to your local court.

> It would have cost me as much in hotal and travel fees to fly back for the court dates

You don't have to sue there. Moreover, if it costs you money to engage your court process, you make that part of the damages. They pay that, and quite possibly tripled.

Talk to a lawyer, please. The law is ready for common things.

Appreciate the advice! I'll look into it.

A lawyer is going to cost you $400 an hour. No lawyer is going to take a case on contingency (where they pay all the costs and recover it from the payout) unless there is a big chunk of money at the end. The risks aren't worth the effort.

Almost all lawyers will do a short consultation where they can help you determine if the case is even worth pursuing. That's what "talk to a lawyer" means in this context.

The court where you moved to doesn’t have jurisdiction.

The types of damages you can recover in small claims are limited. It’s usually just actual damages.

Thank for you some sense. It's usually just compensatory damages, which is limited to just the cost of whatever the item was. You can ask for punitive damages to punish the other party, but that would be rare to get that without the other side having done something very malicious.

> The court where you moved to doesn’t have jurisdiction.

Yes, it does. Banks are federally regulated.

> The types of damages you can recover in small claims are limited.

In most of the country it's five figures, which is enough to get a bank to stop screwing around

Are you saying that you can sue in any jurisdiction, regardless of where the tort took place, and compel the bank’s officers to appear in court?

> In most of the country it's five figures

I said the types of damages, not the amount (which is also limited).

Have you ever litigated in small claims court? I don't think you have because you use the word "fine" which is not used outside of statutory claims generally, and probably wouldn't be something that comes up in a small claims action (you'd be asking for damages).

IANAL, so my advice when dealing with the courts at all is to tread very carefully. You can easily lose your shirt, especially against larger opponents, if they wish to get vindictive and manage to get you to pay their legal costs when you lose.

> Have you ever litigated in small claims court?

Yes.

> I don't think you have because

This is not relevant to me.

> IANAL, so my advice

This is not relevant to me.

I had a similar problem with buying an item on Swappa - the very same “seller found a tracking number going to my town” and gave that to PayPal as proof of shipment. It happened oddly fast, and the ship-from location didn’t match the seller’s.

I think this takes advantage of recent-ish changes to shipping emails and tracking numbers where they don’t show the full destination address, presumably for privacy. Yay unintended consequences :/

In my case it worked out ok, just took a while. After some back and forth with the seller and then going radio-silent, I told Swappa, they canceled the sale and banned the seller almost immediately, and then I had to file a dispute with PayPal where they held my money for a full 30 days before handing it back.

This is a common scam on platforms like eBay, and it seems like Paypal's policies in particular make it very hard to get your money back.

Tracking numbers can't be considered anything but public information, considering both the ease of scraping and all the 3rd party sites to enter them on for tracking.

I helped my father with an issue where a seller (not on eBay) sent a PayPal tracking number for the same town as proof of shipment.

Oddly enough, they sent a tracking number for a package that I had seen that morning at my day job... I explained that to PayPal and we got our money back.

I had a package. FedEx fucked up and delivered it back to the merchant instead of me. It clearly shows this on the tracking. I never got the package. My bank (Square) refused the chargeback as the package had technically been "delivered" even though it wasn't delivered to me.

In the UK, if your bank refuses a chargeback but you still feel wronged, you can escalate it to the financial ombudsman or even small claims. Is there no further escalation possible in the USA?

Yeah, we have small claims where this sort of matter is settled. It’s very inexpensive in most places to file a claim and you don’t need an attorney/solicitor.

Will the card contact allow small claims? Doubt it.

The court case would be between you and the entity that owes you money - the payment method doesn't matter. In fact, this is the same reason that winning a card chargeback typically doesn't absolve you from contractual obligations towards the seller (though in most cases if they lose a card chargeback they have very little to stand on in court so they are unlikely to pursue it and even less likely to win it).

You can complain to the banking regulator that they didn’t follow the procedures, but that’s not really an appeal of the decision itself.

You’d have to argue that they either didn’t follow procedure or did a perfunctory job that did not really comply. However, these complaints go to a different team in the bank that may just decide to compensate you.

I appealed at the bank. The appeals team simply said the actual facts of the case hadn't changed so the charge was still my responsibility.

There is an ombudsman in the USA, but it's no use, I tried in a wronged cashback situation.

Small claims is a nightmare. I've litigated in small claims for over a decade. Most jurisdictions allow the other party to bring a courtroom full of lawyers and witnesses to destroy you. Judges seem to have small claims and side with the real lawyers. Obviously you can pay $25,000 for a real lawyer to fight for your $100 chargeback, but you're unlikely in the USA to get your legal fees back even if you win.

How did they get your credit card information? If it was stolen then it’s a simple fraud case and you’re not liable for any of it with any major credit card in the US (the federal law maximum liability would be $50).

In that case the chargeback reason is simple - the card was stolen, these are fraudulent purchases and you are not liable. If you have a balance on the credit card you refuse to pay the amount. They should remove the charge. And if your bank isn’t doing the right thing you file a simple online complaint with the CFPB. You will get a response in 15 days or so.

Though I’m not exactly sure why your ire is so strongly directed towards eBay and not your bank. They sound like the real villains here since you are their customer, not eBays.

>How did they get your credit card information? If it was stolen then it’s a simple fraud case and you’re not liable for any of it with any major credit card in the US (the federal law maximum liability would be $50).

Yes stolen. Not the physical card, but the information skimmed or hacked somewhere.

>In that case the chargeback reason is simple - the card was stolen, these are fraudulent purchases and you are not liable. If you have a balance on the credit card you refuse to pay the amount. They should remove the charge. And if your bank isn’t doing the right thing you file a simple online complaint with the CFPB. You will get a response in 15 days or so.

I did file a charge back as fraud/stolen. My bank removed every other charge from that day. Including the e-bay charge. Then e-bay appealed. E-bay sent back a very long document asserting my own name was on the account, that a tracking number showed something went to my house. I've forgotten what all was on there, but it was a lot. The hacker basically had all my information; not sure how but my employer's human resources was hacked so maybe they got some of it from there.

So for the first 15 days or so the charge was reversed. Then e-bay won the appeal. The issue is e-bay knew the seller is fake. I also contacted e-bay and told them the charges were fraudulent. E-bay just ignored me. They knew the seller was fraudulent but appealed the chargeback anyway. The charges were re-instated.

Everything revolved around that tracking number. My bank talked to me very condescendingly and noted the invoice had my address and that the tracking number went to my city (I couldn't find out WHERE in my city it goes because UPS does not reveal that to anyone but the actual customer.) Both e-bay and the bank could have found out that tracking number was shipped before even the time of the alleged order. I was treated like a thief by both e-bay and my bank. Ultimately they ganged up on me. I'll never understand why the bank was able to justify reversing every single other charge that day but the e-bay charge. But I do know it is because e-bay made the chargeback process a living hell for my bank, because e-bay has a legal division devoted to fucking over the customer as much as possible when they get a chargeback. That is the source of my ire at e-bay.

So yes my ire was also at my bank. But this threat was about e-bay. My bank was a small regional bank that not a lot of people know about.

> So yes my ire was also at my bank. But this threat was about e-bay. My bank was a small regional bank that not a lot of people know about.

I mean this sounds like it was a while ago so it's probably too late to do much (if you don't owe that bank any money then it's another matter entirely to get money from them - you'd have to sue most likely). But for future reference, if they don't give you satisfaction get the state (AG) and the feds (CFPB or reserve) involved - it's usually a simple online form or two. The smaller bank in this case is actually in one's favor since their failure to play ball with a federal regulator is a bigger problem for them. But I have had to file these complaints a few times for I've never failed to get a response back from the executive level.

I have had chargebacks "denied" because of this exact same stupid shit - tracking number in the same city shit before, but I calmly explain that it doesn't pass muster as evidence. Unfortunately even the big banks often reject on meritless grounds hoping you'll just go away. But it's surprisingly easy to take the next step and that usually makes things go in your favor.

There might not be any reason you can't still file a complaint with https://www.consumerfinance.gov/complaint/.

Thank you for the advice!

Yeah, that's not just fraud, that's a targeted attack. Definitely not getting the whole story here. How'd they get your card number?

There's nothing else to the story on my end. My card number was skimmed or hacked from somewhere. I was unable to determine from where. The source they got it from apparently had my address and personal details.

Awhile back the human resources at my employer was hacked which included basically all my information, so perhaps its on the black market somewhere. I don't know.

I assume e-bay was chosen as a platform for the scammers because e-bay aids and abets these operations by offering very good chargeback prevention via their legal team. Rather than the scammer defending the chargeback directly, they can leverage the might of a mega-corporation who has a well-oiled machine to fight the banks.

I had similar - been on there for 19 years buying and selling. Recently mainly buying (£x,xxx in last 12months). Went to sell, had to go through some new steps - appeared new sub account for sales? Something pinged... boom blocked for life as apparently linked to a random account I don't know.

Several call backs over weeks that it will be 'looked at'. Total lie.

I can never sell on ebay again, but can buy buy buy.

Anyone from ebay reading this - sort your shit out. It is laughable.

I had a very similar experience and pretty much gave up on eBay (after 23 years of being a happy customer).

https://tsak.dev/posts/the-decision-is-final-and-we-cannot-r...

They still owe me over £100 but it's probably useless to attempt to collect.

The best bit was that I was asked to log into my other account but was unable to connect to customer support because it was suspended forever.

The only sad thing is that eBay is that perfect place for selling random things that are too valuable for Facebook marketplace.

> They still owe me over £100 but it's probably useless to attempt to collect.

If you have the time, please take the matter to small claims court out of principle (in fact, you can tack on reasonable fees for your time on top of the claimed amount).

I have looked into that but the consensus online seems to be that eBay isn't really a UK company so it is hard to find the entity to take to small claims court.

What the Dickens were you thinking even getting involved with E-Bay?

Aren't they the company who mailed a severed pigs head [1] and made death threats to people they don't like? [2] Did that story turn out to be bogus? Or do people have really short memories? Or are people afraid to even talk about it? Why is anyone even talking about them as if they were a legitimate company instead of a bunch of gangsters who have only escaped jail on some technicality?

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ebay-lawsuit-massachusetts-coup...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/07/lawsuit-ebay-tri...

Not that this makes it any better, but the article says a "bloody pig face Halloween mask", which seems different enough to warrant stating.

That said, the whole list of things in the article is truly awful:

"Executives texted among themselves about the need to "take her down" and "burn her to the ground."

The harassment campaign included anonymous deliveries of live cockroaches and spiders, a funeral wreath, and a bloody pig face Halloween mask to the couple's home, according to federal prosecutors. The employees also sent pornographic magazines with the husband's name on them to a neighbor's house and planned to break into the couple's garage to install a GPS device on their car."

For some reason people never learn the lessons when it comes to sacred cows of US corporatism. People think that they personally will receive Infinite Corporate Benevolence, and not Infinite Corporate Evil. And then they get shafted, of course.

Really, people are all too happy to bring cyberpunk into reality, as soon as possible.

> For some reason people never learn the lessons when it comes to sacred cows of US corporatism.

I think you mean corporate capitalism.

Corporatism is a different thing.

I think they rather mean "corporatocracy": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatocracy

Or perhaps a Coprotocracy [1], if that's not too "fecetious".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coprophilia

I’ve had issues like this. Now I go on LinkedIn and connect with executives. After a few connect with me I message them asking if they know who I should speak with about account issues.

I also simultaneously use Twitter to reach out to their customer service team.

I’ve had no problems getting help for any kind of issue between these parallel efforts.

Twitter is excellent for customer service. Not sure it’s good at anything else.

LOL. I tried this, contacted the executives and got permabanned for "contacting employees outside the support channel."

That happened to me with Discord.

Signed up, logged in, then was banned.

Luckily I use throwaway emails for everything so I just made another.

Same, discord and twitter both banned. On discord someone wanted to chat, so I opened a PM chat with my new account and said hi. Super suspicious I guess. On twitter I liked a tweet and later wanted to post a tweet but by that point my account was banned. Liking a message is very suspicious also I guess. Bank account also denied with no reason given (Germany), and accounts that advertise with not having to pass the magic algorithm check have fees similar to a netflix subscription whereas the general public gets it free.

I'm surprised paypal hasn't banned me yet! I avoid using it whenever possible anyhow, I'll probably lose access to that sooner or later as well.

Somehow this wasn't a problem before the Internet. What did you have to do to get banned from access to networks of similar size to ebay/twitter, so like a national transport network I guess? It's almost unheard of. What causes this? I guess spam and fraud are the two categories. How do we fix this at the root instead of having secret judges, is having to show government ID to the ISP a solution so you can be convicted for fraud, and blocking non-compliant ISPs? Seems authoritarian as well.

Not banned but was shadowblocked from posting on Twitter a few years ago. There was nothing I had posted recently that was remotely controversial. Filed a ticket, got a response, and I could post again in a few days. As others have mentioned, the CSR probably doesn't even know why the block happened.

Twitter has a weird, dynamic and patriarchy shadowbanning, I suppose to steer general directions of the platform out of nerd/anime/tech into politics and rage so to diversify, if I were to heavily sugarcoat it. Which have worked in case their goal was to exit to Elon.

I also got "banned" from twitter. (They actually just told me I couldn't use it again until I sent them some form of government ID - no thanks.) Never even posted a comment, only used it to read and like tweets periodically. Had it for maybe two years before they pulled this shit on me.

Did you consider the possibility that the throwaway email account is what caused your account to be flagged?

I also only use strictly throwaway emails. If a website finds it fishy, they will tell you while you are attempting to create an account (in which case I just dont use a random string and use random words instead). Back when I was in the coversion process, several accounts were frozen when i switched from a real to throwaway email. Each time I just emailed customer service with the custom email, they realized I'm not a bot and as long as I could pass dual verification (which I can because I'm me), they unfroze my account and occasionally apologize.

How would Discord know it was a throwaway email?

I use Fastmail + their masked email feature with a legit DNS, not a random one time email gen site.

Oh well if Fastmail says its legit, surely nobody could ever detect anything like that...

The really messed up thing is that actual organized bad actors aren't really affected by account bans too much: it's just a cost of doing business for them. Criminals have systems in place in friendly jurisdictions to create a number of new company accounts and with a bit of effort just resume whatever fraud they were engaged with under a new profile with a fresh new account when they get shut down.

Only the stupidest low-level criminals get shut down by the "ban first, and ask no questions later" practice.

Compounded by Silicon Valley's refusal to engage with normal people, I think the number of false positives and lives and businesses destroyed by their refusal to provide human customer support is significantly greater than anybody suspects.

Amusingly, I got banned from eBay Partner Network (e.g. affiliate links) after my hobby site got a little traction in a HN comment. Banned within hours; they responded to my emails, only enough to say the ban was being upheld.

So as a regular reminder, be wary of relying on the good graces of a giant corporation for your monetization!

I once listed >10k worth of equipment on eBay (spring cleaning) and got instantly banned as well. However, in my case I explained all to eBay support and they put me back on. So try again and again until you get to somebody willing to speak to you.

I once had an Amazon seller ban right after enlisting items and it just went into an infinite automated loop which looked like "give us a proof!" "here is the proof" "give us a proof!" etc. Back then I didn't know you had to literally bribe Amazon managers via some "external consultancies" (friends) to reinstate you back. Maybe eBay is doing the same now...

> So try again and again until you get to somebody willing to speak to you.

Or maybe they could skip doing that, and have some self-respect instead.

Ebay has reached that size where it doesnt really matter what they do, you'll see this in the largest of entities unless they seriously fcuk up because of factors like market dominance, saturation, the need to profit take and finite number of users. Hedge funds do this when they buy brands to add to their portfolia, they will streamline, cost cut, perhaps run the brand down to the bare bones whilst they formulate the best "improvement" leapfrog move in their market to perform in a few years time.

Ebay is under pretty heavy competition from Facebook marketplace, Aliexpress, Amazon, and various smaller buy/sell site. The average user has no problem with the site. It's only edge cases like this.

We are all an edge case.

Not really because you have to join Facebook to access their marketplace and I refuse to go on Facebook, AliExpress thats predominantly for the Chinese market, its mainly unbranded tat, Amazon you cant really sell 2nd hand on Amazon and its not an auction site, its just for manufacturers and resellers of new stuff or returns. So all in all Ebay is the no 1 place to sell 2nd hand gear.

Same crap. Created an account, listed a GPU (for $700), got banned within 5 minutes, no reason, nothing.

Unfortunately that sounds exactly the kind of action that would be a high probability for fraud.

That also sounds exactly the kind of action that a normal person would take to sell a GPU he no longer needed.

Not really. I would never begin an ebay account with selling. I would start with buying, get some positive feedback and completed transactions before moving on to selling small items initially.

As a buyer, I would never buy anything worth hundreds of dollars like a GPU from someone with zero feedback who just joined ebay.

Well, in case it works that way - they better create a tutorial and block the features for new users instead of insta-banning.

What kind of fraud? There is buyer protection and zero risks for eBay - PayPal won't release the money until the delivery is confirmed, what you are talking about?

I've been a happy Ebay user for 14 years, 100% positive feedback both as a seller and buyer, and the rare problems were always solved promptly by the support. They once even called me to give support on sunday and were extremely polite and supportive.

Now does this mean Ebay is perfect? Nope, not even close, but hanging up users calls sounds very new to me; please, if there is more to this story let us know.

On a second thought, you may have triggered some of their scam detection algorithms. I built my reputation in years by initially buying and selling small parts and objects, then more expensive devices and instrumentation, and would never trust anyone with a fresh account and no feedback points suddenly selling stuff for hundreds pounds. However, hanging up your call still isn't the proper way of giving support, so I'd like to know more if there is more.

OP: On both phone calls I asked to speak to a supervisor. In both cases the agent promptly hung up on me.

I know little about EBay but if caller just immediately demanded a supervisor and did not accept any other result, the agent hanging up on them might be the logical result. Any large organization has to have standard procedures and "I'm escalating immediately before I get my result" can't be allowed in this situation 'cause everyone would do it.

Everyine knows you have those dumb recipes. Fuck those

Yeah, a brand-new, zero feedback account selling used consumer electronics screams fence, unfortunately for those who are doing it legitimately.

Or it is someone who doesn't bother with the hassle of trying to sell things over the internet and ship them, etc for items worth less than $100. They're a SWE who is making $200k/yr, overworked, already have other hobbies and selling something on ebay for $100 just isn't worth the mental effort to them.

So they could very legitimately have half a dozen old electronic items worth around about $1,000 per item when they first start trying to sell things.

That's literally my case - it's not worth the hassle to sell small items as I can just keep them, but wanted to get rid of some bulky server & network equipment as it was taking up significant space (fairly niche & specialized, I can't imagine those having much malicious activity around them).

In this case, what's the proper set of steps to level up your account so you can sell electronics?

I got my account banned instantly despite having a significant history as a guest buyer (with same email & delivery address) as well as an old account with a successful 4-figure sale that I ended up deactivating long ago.

Also, if selling electronics (or any other risky categories) is a no-go and an instant ban, why not just prevent posting such listings to begin with, or require additional verification upfront to deter malicious activity?

Sell one at a time.

this cannot be the solution.

something that is immediately better is allowing users to tell the system that you are setting up an inventory. just imagine people opening an account to do some online e-commerce and trying to set up their inventory...

Sell locally on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. You'll avoid scams from fake buyers that way also, if you limit yourself to in-person cash sales.

Sounds like you got caught up in their spam & abuse systems, if I had to guess. Spam/scams are at extremely high levels right now across every platform (Oddly somehow, HN keeps things under control) -- so companies are getting aggressive with anti abuse techniques and capturing innocents by mistake.

I was amazed that I could make over $10,000 a week in my spare time working from home! You can too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIcSWuKMwOw

This is probably the funniest comment on HN.

Okay so I knew it was gonna be a rickroll but I'm particularly amused at which Rickroll you chose.

I got a feeling that so many of the new accounts being made are for spam or scams so that some crappy ML algorithm overfits towards new account as a marker for scams.

Twitter had the same problem a while ago where I could not make an account without it getting instabanned.

Twitter uses instabans as a way to fish for phone numbers - you can unban the account instantly by providing one.

Oh ye that might explain it. I thought it was incompetence rather than malice but that might be too naive.

A few years ago I think they wanted to ban me because I had never sold anything but listed up something that was just taking up space in a closet —IIRC they suspended my account and I had to call them to get it reactivated. I also think having an account since ‘01 saved me from the hammer ban as the nice customer service agent seemed be surprised I would gasp want to sell something on an online auction marketplace after all those years.

The root of the problem is that services like eBay or Google don’t have any incentive to handle this properly. It’s the same reason they don’t care about quality or reliability of services they provide (although eBay really isn’t as bad compared to google), they only care about keeping up appearances.

It’s not a technical problem, and not a problem specific to eBay. The only way to fix it is to introduce laws forcing companies to handle those cases properly.

I wish there were a third-party arbiter for account management that's trusted and most companies use as a last resort. It might involve paying a fee to have your case heard with some of it refunded if you win. Basically, a way for people to demonstrate that they're real and serious about the account, and a way for companies to outsource this headache.

Yes it's called arbitration and it's in the eBay ToS.

So how do you invoke it? It doesn't sound like it's been available to the complainants here.

https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/member-behaviour-policies...

It's amazing how badly Ebay has fallen. I was an early adopter decades ago, and used it to buy and sell all kinds of trinkets and collectibles that were virtually impossible to buy/sell/trade locally.

The first major crack in the armor came when they removed the ability of sellers to leave feedback for buyers. Feedback was the only way you could figure out who was a scammer and/or someone difficult that ought to be avoided. It also acted as a deterrent for buyers who were prone to making demands and/or trying to extort a discount after having "won" an auction, as their account would be marked as shady for future transactions. This led me to stop selling on Ebay, and just use for it a few purchases.

Recently, after many years away, I cleaned out my spare room and fired up Ebay to sell a relatively low-value (couple hundred $) item. I found that I was no longer able to use Paypal, but instead prompted to give all of my banking information to Ebay. After the item sold, I was informed by Ebay that my money would be held by Ebay for 6 weeks as a "safety measure". After 29 days (1 day from the maximum 30 days time to report a problem) the "buyer" filed a dispute saying the item had not been received (despite the item having been shipped with tracking and confirmed to have been delivered 29 days before). Ebay reflexively sided with the "buyer", and, long story short, I was forced to refund the money, without getting the item back, and with Ebay keeping their fees.

After that debacle I immediately tried to remove my banking information and close by Ebay account, only to find out that Ebay doesn't allow you to remove your banking information, and you cannot close your account (only start a process that allows your account to be closed after a month, at Ebay's discretion).

Needless to say I will never be using Ebay to buy or sell anything again.

Usual eBay tactics. I’m a long term seller on eBay and it’s a shit show. The only reason I use it is because the market is the best out there.

EBay don’t give a crap about anything once fees are collected.

Reddit did that to my account 4 days ago with a "3 day suspension". No reason. No justification. Just "fuck off for 3 days". No responses either on the appeals.

I'm the owner/head mod for a VERY popular subreddit. I gave it a very hard thought about systematically destroying that sub.

It would make 200k people very sad, but in the end, its reddit's community that relies on *my* free labor to deal with pornspam and ilk. And, it would be me deplatforming 200k people that would likely go elsewhere.

I didn't do it. Coolers heads have prevailed... for now. I'm still the mod. Nothing's changed. But I've equipped the sub with a few alts. If they do that suspension again, then I will respond in kind.

I'm frankly tired of being a digital serf with unknown automated punishment mechanisms.

you are "lucky" it was a 3-day suspension... they like permanent bans, a lot...

And you're 100% right.

And I am really giving it thought in destroying the "community" aka reddit's profit motive. Im quite done being a "volunteer" kind-of-owner of a subreddit with no support.

My choice probably won't affect that much in the larger picture. Maybe it will?

> My choice probably won't affect that much in the larger picture. Maybe it will?

if everyone thinks that it won't affect the larger picture and do nothing, it probably won't... but who knows... maybe a better alternative popping up is all we need...

They're in IPO mode and systematically purging anything remotely controversial. My 9 year old account got suspended for saying that the admins enable pedophilia. They actually IP banned me so I can't create a new account.

People are even being mass-banned for upvoting controversial content or participating in certain subreddits. Sometimes the admins lock users out of their accounts so they can't log in, appeal the suspension, or delete their posts/comments.

I think the ad-hoc selling on the internet thing is kinda done, outside maybe craigslist-like things. But selling obscure things often requires a bigger than local market, where you need the full US or similar size to get a sale at a price that is worth the trouble. If there is at least $10 or $20 profit I could entice a kid to do the legwork. Have a job, so mostly doing it to save things from ending up in landfills.

I've had ebay and amazon accounts for 20+ years. Was happy with selling used books on amazon for example, but for several years can't sell any longer until they can pierce the rest of my privacy. Sucks because I had a highly rated history.

Maybe I should log in to ebay again and see if it is still possible to sell there, but this message fills me with zero confidence.

People don’t realize the problem with the internet, social media, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, etc. until it hits them in the head from an opposite direction.

"First they came for the truckers and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trucker.

Then they came for the Russians and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Russian.

.."

I've been using/selling on Ebay for several years. I've had zero issues. Although don't get me started on Paypal being garbage.

Maybe there is more you aren't telling us, or maybe you're being honest. Good luck!

There could have been a problem with recently created accounts posting a few listings right away, posting a listing for an item which is similar to that item some fraudsters have been selling, or maybe their resident prophet read a sacrificial bull’s entrails and told to beware of the topic starter.

You never know. And they won’t tell you.

And this arbitrariness is the problem precisely.

And no, an argument that telling the reason would help the crooks is not going to work, or the place wouldn’t be swarming with them already.

This person's experience seems to be validated by others. I also have had a similar experience.

Sounds like you have more to lose if you were banned from eBay. Watch out!

I'm happy that we don't need to use Paypal to receive money from Ebay anymore (I think you can't)... it goes straight to your bank account...

I mean, some random new guy showing up to sell a few hundred pounds worth of electronics first thing has got to look exactly like the fraudsters look to them. This really sucks for the OP, but if Ebay didn't stop accounts fitting that fact pattern, they'd get even more fraudsters on their site.

I would just simply introduce the law mandating any of those faceless companies to give reasonable explanation when denying service for any reason (written by human) with the huge fine if not given within some time frame. The victim then should be able to pursue relief in a small claim court if not satisfied, or normal court or outright claim persecution. If happens on wide enough scale all those big corporate jerks might actually get off their asses and for once do something to fix their fuck ups.

Having trouble fully believing that they wouldn't provide any information about the reasons or evidence, but they would tell you the length of the banishment. Like, if the phone rep was going to simply hang up on you, why would they hesitate just to squeeze in the fact that it's a lifetime ban.

I'm not saying this story didn't happen, but like most things, when you only hear one side of the story, certain events may not be told precisely as they actually happened.

My understanding is that the most likely cause when there's a permanent ban put into place is a suspicious of stolen goods. This happened to a prominent person in the reselling community with a big following:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Flipping/comments/u2bgr8/daily_refi...

A eBay rep killed my project by flagging the account for fraud after I asked to speak to supervisor (she refused three times and the account was magically flagged the next day). All of my listings got suspended. It made the whole project untenable costing the client thousands. There was no fraud, there were no signals of fraud , just petty spite. I’ll never use eBay for anything important. Nobody should ever use eBay for anything that matters.

The same thing happened to me. I was just trying to buy a charger for my razer and suddenly my account got permabanned. After constant back and forth with Customer Support, they told me that I won't be able to use eBay ever again and that they couldn't help me because getting my account back was above their control. I was asking what I did wrong and they couldn't even answer that either.

Using a VPN? An upstanding friend used a VPN to access Instagram and had his account confiscated. Took six months to convince them to unlock it.

Just yesterday I bought stuff on ebay using a VPN (PIA). They locked my account and made me do a password reset.

I suppose good thing I was just buying, not selling anything.

I bet it's a massive factor in fraud detection and they figure it might be worth the collateral damage. Once upon a time, the subset of people using a VPN would've been the subset recommending sites to other users (e.g., Google's rise over Altavista), but I bet that's less the case now.

Quick question…did your account have a history and past positive reviews from any purchases you had made in the past?

I have a long-standing account and rarely buy on eBay nowadays (I’m trying to recall if I’ve ever sold anything…if I have it was maybe only one item but I don’t even recall if it sold or not).

Recently, I was looking into buying a used gaming PC via eBay to save a few bucks and I ended up completing a “Buy it now” purchase quickly without looking more into the seller (or their location). The location wasn’t a big deal (Paris, France) but that mainly meant the shipping would take longer. What ended up being more concerning was the 0 rating for the seller, which immediately make think “oh crap”. I reached out to the seller just to see if I could get a response with no quick reply, but I sent one short follow up the next day when I didn’t receive a response and shared my concern and waited another day before reaching out to eBay about the concern I had about the seller (especially because by this point the original listing was gone and then it even seemed like the seller’s account too). I used the live chat option and the person there was very helpful and got the process started and mentioned to reach back on Friday (about 3 days later), but later that same day my refund was issued and the case closed which I was grateful for.

But it did make me wonder of what might be an apparent difficulty for newer accounts to sell successfully on the platform? (Kind of like stories I’ve heard about liquor licenses being grandfathered in for certain locations in cities, whereas it may be more work for a new location to apply for one…maybe newer sellers can easily be flagged? The inability to dispute the situation when you are obviously willing/able to communicate with the eBay staff however is the sad part in your story since legitimate individuals should always have recourse to be heard in these large tech platforms).

I got banned a month ago with the same situation - trying to sell niche electronics and servers (neither expensive nor something you'd typically associate with any kind of scam). Did you list any items as local pickup only? Due to the bulkiness of the items I did so and I wonder if there's some scam we're not aware of that causes them to auto-ban anything with local collection only?

I since sold the items on a different website but will be making a GDPR DSAR to 1) get the data they hold about me (to see if there's anything that would explain the ban) and 2) to request a manual review of what must've been an automated decision.

I was permabanned from eBay. My only thought was I linked to the vendor website, maybe HTML links are nonos or something.

It’s simple economics, dealing with false positives have a negative ROI, so these businesses have a fiduciary duty to fuck you over..

Wow so this post apparently blew up. A few updates:

1. I called for a third time and got a very helpful support person (Rod) who was able to unlock my account. The strange thing is that Rod did not ask me a single question about my intentions on the platform. I have no idea why Rod could unlock my account so easily but the other two refused and hung up on me.

2. I re-posted the 6 items I wanted to sell but I still have the feeling that my account is shadow-banned since they all have exactly 0-1 views in 24 hours. That seems suspiciously low for popular electronics (Switch games and synthesizers)

3. This isn't even my worst experience with eBay ever! That would be ~5 years ago when I sold my old cell phone on eBay. I apparently forgot to "accept" the payment so the buyer got my phone, eBay charged me for the fees, and I got $0. Yes that's right, I sold my phone for negative money.

Oh and to answer some questions I've seen around the thread:

- The items I am trying to sell are 3x used Nintendo Switch games (25GBP each), an audio interface (50GBP), a synthesizer (80GBP) and a groovebox (200GBP).

- I had to open a new account to sell because I moved to the UK and eBay would not let me use my older US account with a new bank account, address, or phone number. So I had no choice but to be a zero-star seller because eBay can't handle people moving.

- I get that they're worried about stolen goods but they did not give me any chance to prove that the goods were mine. I could have provided receipts for all of them. One of them was even an item I bought on eBay! Instead I was just told I am banned forever.

- I can confirm that the person who "helped" me really just shadowbanned me. I see my listings as active but I can't see anything if I go incognito.

California resident here.

They may even try to charge you - watch out - This happened to me. I recommend you call your bank and place a block on Ebay. They will not delete my banking information, even though I demanded this. The only way I could prevent them from taking my money was by placing a bank block on them.

Unfortunately, eBay is still THE place most small time sellers are going to auction stuff off.

I collect 16mm film reels (classic movies, shows, curiosities, propaganda, etc.) and eBay is really the only place to get those besides the rare estate sale.

Many people sell homemade products on eBay because it's far easier to get started and keep the price down. For example, a specific tool I used for beer kegs, far superior to any of the ones on Amazon, was made by some dude who sold it on eBay.

eBay is a mess, though. I swear there's interfaces from at least 3 different design eras. I have problems with images randomly not loading. It seems like the quintessential result of risk averse management milking the cash cow. Seems almost unsurprising how badly they are treating users such as the OP. I don't think they care.

I would really like to hear the other side of this story.

It's not too uncommon that some automated process blocks something. And customer service not being too helpful is also common. But the customer service being that rude, twice ... something is missing here. I my experience, if somebody gets blocked off like that, ghosted, hung up like that, something else has happened. There are different ways for a customer to express their issue and present their complain. Some get rude, demand to talk to a supervisor, and it sounds a bit like that's what happened here. That it happened twice is another indication.

It may have been bad from the customer service's side. Not impossible. But there is a smell to this story that makes me wonder what actually happened.

Yeah there are a few missing details I’d like filled in before I take any sides here. What kinds of electronics was the OP trying to sell? What did they say to the customer service agents to prompt them to immediately hang up on them?

I had the exact same issue a few years ago. Mine was closer to four hours instead of an hour. I was selling a phone for a relative. I received an email that the account was suspend and when inquired as to what was going on eBay told me that they had detected that I was trying to contact the buyer directly which was expressly forbidden by their policy. When I explained that I had no contact with anyone regarding the item they said they would reinstate the account and item. I told them that it was not necessary and asked that the account be closed. Ebay is a toxic shit hole. It doesn't matter if you are honest and looking to use their platform the way it was intended as Ebay the company will require you to wade into their toxic shit proactively.

It has happened to friends of mine, a year ago, and was the topic of conversation over some beers. They too just wanted to sell some old or unused computer and electronic "crap", that others might find useful. Instead, banned for life!

A lot of these online companies have become plain whack with the algorithms, policies, and customer service. They just don't care, as long as they are making money. Only when it starts to hurt them financially, will we see them start to care.

People have to "vote with their feet", and simply not use disrespectful and unfriendly companies. When enough people are using eBay alternatives, that's when they will start to "investigate" their policies and treatment of users.

Happened to me too. No way to appeal - they simply aren't interested. In their eyes if you've been banned it is absolutely correct and unappealable. Can't even get through to a human.

Oh well, their loss. Mine too.

You were able to call them? I used online support and was told I had to call, but they can't give me the number, just refresh thier account help page until a.number comes up. That was 3 months ago, I start refreshing a few times a day, now I don't bother.

I have some obscure electronics I'd let fo cheap, but I guess I'll have to scrap them. I'm sure the right person would want my stuff asked spares but there is no way for us to connect.

Happened to me, too. Except made an account, bought some buck converter modules I could only find cheap on Ebay. 30 minutes later account banned, I contact support and their response was basically "we cannot reactivate your account, we cannot tell you why we banned you as this is company policy".

Ebay is a monopolistic cesspool that needs a few good handfuls of government regulation.

This happened to me with a 8+ year old account. By no means was I a power user, maybe having only bought a few things over those 8 years. I go to sell a pair of shoes, the leather type being `Waxed Flesh` somewhere in the description, for like 250$, and was immediately banned for life on that account. CS refused to even acknowledge my existence pretty much after that.

You can always ask your lawyer for a letter to eBay pretending clarifications and informing them that while it's perfectly legit on their side (at least in my country) banning you you will start investing in advertisement against them telling your history, witch is again another perfectly legit activity and reputational damages count a bit so far...

Just curious, what were you trying to sell? Were any of the items prohibited, or something that might run afoul of some law somewhere? For example, certain computers or game consoles cannot be sold in certain markets (export restrictions), or devices that might be used for practical jokes (TV or radio jammers), that sort of thing.

It helps readers to know what might in turn get them banned.

Much thanks,

Colin

> I signed up for an eBay account.

> my account was suspended.

> Don’t use eBay.

Been on ebay since 2001 and never had issues.

There's a variety of reasons why OP was banned, email, risk management, using vpn, shared ISP where people have been doing frauds from, other reasons.

This post really shouldn't be grounds to tell people not to use ebay, many people do successfully and have for decades.

As a long time user, it sounds like you would be greatly impacted by such a ban. Watch out! If you at all depend on eBay for your livelyhood, have a backup plan or parallel path. eBay is shit.

I won't but whatever you were doing got you banned. I don't rely on ebay for sales, its really good for buying collectibles or selling them.

the reason we don't blame the victim is because it requires someone else to do a harmful action that wasn't necessary.

ebay's action and implementation is not necessary. this is a conversation about that.

we dont know who the victim here is.

strange seeing all these old inactive accounts suddenly posting in this thread.

its like somebody actually took the time to create multiple accounts, to astroturf a given thread in the future. pretty pathetic use of time if you ask me.

okay. the reason we don't blame the affected person is because..

you can also take the opposite meaning from this signal. I haven't posted in 75 days, but a thread about ebay screwing people over was enough to get me to login.

I comment more on these types of threads (random banning by big corp who never provides reasons) than the random software project ones because these are more substantial

Your "I've never had problems" is just another anecdotal story like the op's. Why is your opinion that eBay is okay more acceptable to strangers than the op's opinion not to use it?

I have been in eBay since 2005 and for some reason in 2021 they decided to put my account in "probation" mode and limit my amount of monthly sales to 150eur. They could as well have banned me altogether.

> There's a variety of reasons why OP was banned, email, risk management, using vpn, shared ISP where people have been doing frauds from, other reasons.

And ebay shared none of them. I don't understand the need to jump in to make excuses for them when you have no more information than the rest of us do. Why make up reasons out of whole cloth?

> In both cases the agent promptly hung up on me.

That sounds odd to me. I've never had an agent hang up on me, let alone two.

Exactly, can you imagine how frustrating that would be?

I happened to me many times, but not with Ebay, I think... usually they say something like "I can't help you with this but let me transfer you" and then click

Reading all these comments and realizing it's far from an isolated incident (plus the account suspension stories from other companies), I wonder, is there going to be a time where these shitty platforms eventually collapse on themselves once they end up banning the majority of their userbase?

I think they have far too many non-banned users feeding them $$$ to care; and if their false positive rates go up, they'll be the ones to notice and adjust. Doesn't help the significant (in absolute, not relative terms) number of false positives though.

Did you happen to have a vpn on during all this? I made a discord account today and forgot to disable vpn first. They flagged my account, required my phone number to unlock it and then instantly suspended the account for a really long list of reasons that didn't apply to me.

Listen, EBay is a trash company and all its executives are bad humans. This has been known for decades.

Same here, but for Red Bubble. What's the point of using these sites if you can't even start?

I was permanently banned from Uber even faster than that. It was within ten minutes of signing up, before I used it at all. But after they got my credit card number and whatever other personal information is needed to sign up. No explanation, no recourse.

Can you not turn this into something like a libel or slander lawsuit? They are impugning your name by preventing your ability to sell on their platform by claiming you're fraudulent when you're not. Can that not be taken up by a lawyer?

Ebay is the worst fucking company on the planet and their customer support is garbage. I have lost $400 with no recourse on ebay thanks to their inept support and pick and choose policies. It riles me up so much that i cant even repeat it here

I’ve had an ebay account continuously since 1999. I never use it for selling anymore; the Chinese junk resellers, bias towards those kinds of sellers, and ridiculous fees have warned me off. I only buy.

yep same here ebay has lost me as a customer forever, it feels insulting to be banned when you know you are a honest customer … must be a bad management choice of being led by the wrong KPIs

Something connected to even piece of your PII is likely connected to past fraud or unpaid fees. That plus the category and quantity of the items you’re selling probably triggered this

My first sale on ebay in 1999 was a $10k slide scanner.

I can only imagine how that would have fared nowadays for a kid to create an account and list a $10k device the same day.

The last time I tried selling anything on eBay I was overwhelmed with bids and messages from scammers. You are probably better off.

we just need an online trading system where money can only go in never go out and the quality of the offering will increase over time, and everyone will slowly be able to purchase better stuff OVER TIME

when you buy: you pay real money into the system, zero commission on anything/everything

when you sell: you get money stored in there for your next purchase

like Steam Community Market but with physical products? good luck with that

Funny because if you search Steam Deck on eBay right now almost every result is a scam. And they do nothing about it.

Happened to me twice on Amazon. Amazon also seems to match addresses and phone numbers to detect connected accounts.

I think Reddit uses IP addresses and fingerprinting to detect connected accounts.. wouldn't suprise me if Amazon did the same...

I setup a Twitter account to go with a new Substack I was creating. I’ve posted 1 Tweet and followed 5 people. Account is locked.

I can’t post. I can’t follow anyone. The profile doesn’t show up in search. If you visit it directly you see a warning.

I get a message to try later because they think the account is automated. I try with every browser I know. I install the mobile app and try from there.

Changed my password per their instructions. Nothing.

Verified my phone number. Nothing.

Verified my email. Nothing.

Setup 2FA. Nothing.

I filled out the form that you’re supposed to complete when your account is locked and they say they’ll respond in a few days. A few days later I get a note with some instructions that don’t work, so I reply to the note. An automated message come back that the ticket is closed and to open a new ticket.

As a last resort I paid for Twitter Blue…and I still can’t tweet. On the invoice I got from Twitter it had a support email address that any issues are supposed to go to…so I replied to my invoice (which goes to that address). It comes back with a message that the email address isn’t checked and I should submit a support form.

I have no idea what else there is to do short of setting up a website full of DOGE coin stuff to try to get Elon Musks attention.

I think it's incredibly sad how much regulators let PayPal, Ebay, Apple, and Google get away with in regards to facilitating scammers. Right now PayPal has a loophole in their policies regarding "significantly not as described" claims that leave scammers using the same account for years at a time and winning most disputes against their victims and PayPal is content to collect their fees and help them get away with it.

The scammer will set up some cookie cutter web store claiming to sell items with product descriptions and images copied from genuine retailers but instead of sending you the item pictured, they'll send you whatever the cheapest crap they could dropship from aliexpress is. The site will claim "sold and ships from USA" but whenever the dispute comes in they'll submit the tracking info from China, and whenever that arrives a month or two later the only option through PayPal's policies is a SNAD claim and PayPal will side with the scammer unless you ship the crap to their return address in Beijing in some unrealistic time frame at your own cost. Shipping it back to the scammer internationally for a consumer will cost more than they were scammed out of to begin with so no one is even going to bother with it and even if they did, why would you trust that the scammer would be willing to lose the dispute instead of continuing the lie when PayPal is oh-so-willing to bury their head in the sand and ignore the fraud?

The majority of scams targeting people to convince them to give them money don't try and get the victim to give them a credit card, mail cash, or wire some funds. They have shifted heavily to using iTunes gift cards and Google Play gift cards because even though that surely makes it look incredibly obvious that it's a scam, enough victims still fall for it and in the end even after losing some victims, paying hefty 30% platform fees, and paying another party to launder their funds they still come out ahead compared to traditional methods. If you've ever had an acquaintance who has fallen for these scams a common theme is that even if the victim or someone close to the victim calls Apple immediately after the scam, they'll be told "Sorry the money is already gone, there's nothing to refund" even though every last cent is still sitting in Apple's bank account, it's just been moved from the gift card balance to some shifty app developer because clearly the scammers just wanted to buy $500 worth of collectible items in a game nearly no one has ever heard of.

https://i.imgur.com/oijXbLD.jpeg

I really wish regulators would get their act together and stop letting these companies pretend like the fraud they're facilitating isn't their problem.

The if-statements didn't go your way today.

And that's why you use, for this kind of things, your local ad methods, or at most something that is based on your country. You get banned, you can go physically to their offices or you can, depending on your country laws, hire a lawyer and sue.

Also here in Europe, due to GDPR, you can request to get their info on you out of their systems after you're done doing business with them. If they fail to comply within a certain time-frame (on my country is 30 business days), you can sue and easily win.

I assume you are in the UK?

In EU under GDPR I think europeans have the right to demand that our data is not processed by an algorithm, but by a human instead. You might have a similar right under UK law.

If you live in Europe, you can request eBay to delete all your personal information under the GDPR.

and also request all info they have on you including the reason for termination. however getting this executed is another matter, but it would be a nice court case to win.

One hour is not permanent.

According to the post the selling ban happened about an hour after creating the account but the duration of the ban is "for life."

People will continue to use ebay just like they use Google. Sad

Can cryptography change the state of affairs in this regard?

The whole problem is reputation management here. From eBay's perspective, they did not have strong enough signals that you are an honest person.

With cryptography, you could sign something like "It's me, Joe So And So - signed by the owner of joesoandso.eth". "Oh and here are cryptographically signed endorsements of 3 of my friends who are long term users of eBay". So that eBay has strong evidence you are a reputable person. In an automatable fashion.

No.

"Proof of Humanity" is an interesting blockchain based project that aims to solve some of this. Doesn't prove you're not a scammer though.

There are digital identity systems but you (or at least I) would want a trusted authority--like a government--in the process somehow. Some have a lot of hope for these systems but uptake has been fairly limited.

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