eBay Robbed This Man of $4700 and Suspended His Account When He Asked Questions
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The EU can do giro transfers but in the US, if you want to send money and you don't want to do a check (which have a lot of gotchas, like availability-vs-clearance of funds) then you pretty much have to use a money transmitter service. And these stories have been happening for 15 years at this point, it feels like a matter of "when" they screw you more than "if" at this point.
Pretty unlikely that constructive legislation gets passed in the US ever again though. We have passed the point-of-no-return where even the most obvious stuff can't get passed let alone if Paypal or whoever writes a big check to a congressperson to avoid regulation.
I guess it depends what kinds of transactions you are making on the internet... I have never used paypal or anything similar to send money to a stranger. I occasionally use venmo to send small sums to friends, but never an amount I would be sad to lose.
if you want all the guarantees that come from dealing with a regulated financial institution, you should... go to your bank? they should be happy to set up an ach/wire transfer for you.
Responding to a comment of "we should try and prevent people from getting screwed" with "people should just be smart like me" doesn't seem very helpful.
We're long past the time when that kind of excuse can be used by internet companies. They have taken enough market share now from "traditional" companies to be held to the similar standards. We see the billions they make in profits. Let's now see them use some of those profits to provide the service they boast of in their marketing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_transmitter
(Note that eBay no longer owns PayPal, nor was it even used in this case)
The truth is these same things happen with regular bank accounts. If you bounce some checks, or you have a "risky" business even without any chargebacks, the bank will ask for more info and then close your account and keep the money until you prove that you aren't someone else that previously defrauded them, a nearly impossible task. The recourse is mostly the same.
There's lots of people who don't do anything wrong and then they just get flagged for whatever reason, and their assets are frozen with no recourse other than "go to arbitration [paid for by the company] and hope they give your money back".
Feel free to DM me as well, I seriously wonder if there is some security vulnerability being exploited here that eBay is either incompetent to find or is trying to cover up.
eBay generally sides with the buyer. Malicious buyers know this, and will buy things, and just claim they didn't get them and demand a refund. If you don't capitulate, they file a dispute, or outright report you for fraud. Chances are good they end up with free stuff, and as a seller you're SOL. For cheaper items, it's worth it to eat the cost instead of fighting it.
/\--- I had this happen once, with a buyer from Belgium who bid up an item to more than it was worth. (At the time, no package tracking was available to Belgium - this is why some listers insist on "no international shipping" to this day)
About 10% of selling experiences were bad, whether because of scams or just shady or entitled buyers.
Lastly, though I generally did my best, a few things that gave my buyers bad experiences have happened:
1) eBay sold items while I'm on vacation mode. I got about 5 hours away from home on a month long trip when they sold my item, despite me using their vacation mode option. This happened many times.
2) USPS delivery failing. We've all seen this, packages floating in loops, or never moving. Another time an item was claimed to be broken. Maybe it was, maybe scam.
3) eBay selling my items after I removed my store and unlisted everything. Eventually I had to literally delete all my listings. I had planned on just taking a break, but no way I'm entering all those again. Anyway a couple things sold and I just immediately returned the money and told them no.
I made the guy return to me and threat to report to his local police if he dares to not return to me. He eventually returned it to me. Terrible experience.
First day received a purchase order with an address to a derelict house in Detroit followed by a private message to please send the camera to an address in Africa. Took about a day to cancel the order, and eBay still demanded a cut for this non-existent, fraudulent transaction.
Second day receive a virtually identical attempt, only this time eBay refused my cancellation. Attempted to fight it, no avail. Received a variety of indignant messages from the seller claiming I was some sort of scammer. Once again eBay demanded a cut of this bullshit transaction.
I logged out of the account and sold it via Amazon in about a day no problem. eBay is a joke.
- Sale went through
- Some internal bug occurred preventing money from being released
- Customer calls and asks about the money, support staff can't figure it out.
- Customer keeps calling because they want their money
- "Hey this customer that want's his money is getting annoying, can we please ban him?"
I think the only reasonable recourse is to hire a lawyer to send a letter asking for the money and interest.
Basically they end up collecting sales tax from buyer, as mandated by marketplace laws, but charge the seller typically 13% of the collected sales tax as a fee
A few other states also tax marketplaces on their gross marketplace revenue, and the marketplaces reasonably pass those costs on to their sellers. Though these marketplace taxes are <1% of gross marketplace revenue, not 13% or whatever the local sales tax is.
A lot of anecdotal evidence in the thread that this is a common thing.
I assume there is more to it...
A few years ago I ordered something off eBay. It was overpriced, but it was the only place selling this particular variant of the item. Anyway, the next day they sent me a message saying that variant was out of stock and could send me another instead, but of course I opted to cancel. After a lot of back and forth (them offering me dodgy extras and me refusing) they sent it anyway and told me to return it.
To cut a long story short, they did indeed send the item, but not me. And the mad part is, PayPal admitted to not caring, even with written proof from Royal Mail that the order wasn't addressed to me, PayPal pretty much said (I cant find the original dispute now, so not verbatim) that as long as the order was sent to someone, I have nothing to complain about.
In the end I just asked my bank for a chargeback, which took 5 minutes compared to the literal month the above took.
I ordered a drone, but the package supposedly weighed 75lbs and consisted of 2 palets and went to my city but the wrong zip code according to tracking -- I documented everything and started a dispute but paypal did not care.
This works best with Fedex because they won't release full tracking details afaik unless you know the destination address, which you don't know, of course.
I bought a home automation device from a dodgy site at a price I knew was too good to be true. Needless to say, I never got it, and when I filed a dispute with PayPal, the buyer “substantiated” the shipment with a tracking number. I, of course, never got the package, nor did I get a refund.
There were all kinds of inconsistencies with the seller’s response (as I recall, their first response was that it had already been shipped, and when I escalated it, the tracking number was for an item that didn’t ship until after my dispute), but it was facially good enough for PayPal so the scammer made $60 off me. Live and learn.
Customer service's approach to fixing this is to submit a ticket to engineering that never gets looked at, then encouraging you to open a new account with one of the larger banks (Wells Fargo, Chase, etc.).
You know things are bad when your customers are pining for Paypal back.
UPS and USPS are pretty good about using the door code, FedEx is spotty at best. Lasership, DHL, etc., will drop the package at your door without even ringing the doorbell, and where I live, there's about a 15 minute window, if you're lucky, before someone else grabs the package.
Other option is hire someone with a chair leg to go and get the parts back. If it’s eBay look at their for sale list - some people are stupid enough to relist what “didn’t turn up”.
Nobody bought them, so I lowered the price and re-listed them. Somebody made an offer that I accepted, then stopped responding for a week, so I cancelled the accepted offer and re-listed them again.
eBay then sent me an email telling me that my listing had been removed because they had determined my Airpods were counterfeit. I sent an email to an executive CS contact asking "what is going on?" and eBay sent me another email telling me that my account had been suspended and I should never try to open a new one.
So I took the Airpods out and paired them to an iPhone and obviously they work fine and aren't fake etc. If eBay has some special knowledge here I'd be happy to convey it to the police, Apple, Verizon, etc. Otherwise it's just kind of confusing?
(1) They have removed the suspension on my account
(2) They erroneously flagged my Airpods as counterfeit because (a) none of the photos in the listing clearly showed the serial number and the listing price was too low.
This seems kind of odd to me as (a) I uploaded five photos, and the 3rd one showed most of the serial number but not the whole thing); (b) the listing price, $158, was higher than the highest offer I had previously gotten ($150) and about the same price as completed listings or a little higher.
But I guess you just email exec CS with these erroneous fraud flags and you're all set.
> safer
?????
If hundreds of millions of dollars can be lost by professional crypto firms employing crypto engineers, what hope do Bob and Sally have?
Got the money back in full.
God bless the fiat system.
Haha I'm pretty pro-crypto but "professional crypto firms" almost sounds like an oxymoron...
All Bob and Sally have to do is use a private wallet and store their private keys with redundant backups. Not foolproof but pretty straightforward. The engineers running the exchanges, markets, etc have way more attack vectors and pitfalls to worry about.
Oh, right, they need to unfreeze the wallet using something like metamask and then execute a transfer, running against a service they can't audit... and hope there are no scams in that process, and that metamask isn't vulnerable, and that they only click the right authorization prompts..
Of course this assumes they aren't transferring from a known terrorist or a company ignoring KYC laws which might also land them in hot water.
With crypto you still need to trust someone: the blockchain owners, as they can always do a rollback at any time, as happened with the DAO.
Yes, but the people you need to trust are self-selected, anonymous, distributed, and unaccountable, which is, apparently, better somehow.
People talk about the DAO thing as if it was just a matter of calling some people and ask them to refund everyone, as if history could be reversed. What happened was a fork, and the decision on what fork to go on still required consensus building: those running ethereum nodes and who were against the DAO fork stayed on their paths and went on to call it "Ethereum Classic".
As for gas prices: https://l2fees.info/ will show you that transfers can easily be done with a few cents, and Raiden is (finally!) live and able to do sub-cent transactions (https://medium.com/raiden-network/the-raiden-network-now-liv...)
I hate when people do this, just say it.
Does it? You have the technical hurdle of securing your own wallet, the technisocial challenges of constant scams, the inability to exchange to and from fiat without major, centralized, unregulated exchanges, and even worse than inflation a completely random value story which is somehow "inexplicably" also tied to the fortunes of the markets.
Should you try to work around some of these risks by just using an exchange, you're equally finagled in fintech, and overall I just find it impossibly hard to imagine crypto is actually saving anyone from brutal financial conditions in spite of all these claims.
For common stuff, your local Craigslist equivalent is usually a better option, but let's say you have some niche/specialized industrial electronics, video game collectibles or retro consoles, etc.
Which, funnily enough, is eBay Kleinanzeigen (literally: eBay classifieds) here in Germany.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220425083124/https://www.t-onl...
The buyers use it because it has all the sellers; the sellers because it has all the buyers.
So I have a Facebook account, unfollowed everyone, and just use marketplace sometimes.
I wish Craigslist was better here. It gets maybe .1% of the volume marketplace gets, just not even close. I used it extensively in previous areas.
I get that they really don't 'care'. Programmatic bans happen and whatever.
I just wonder that after someone finds some sort of avenue to contact these companies, what happens exactly? Are the front line customer service folks just instructed to close their ticket if they can't solve it? Does it get forwarded to some other customer service system where they do nothing?
Tell HN: I was permanently banned from eBay in one hour - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31305341 - May 2022 (422 comments)
Also this from a few months ago:
Your eBay account has been suspended - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29435091 - Dec 2021 (141 comments)
We get the stories about Google, Apple, Facebook and the likes all the time.
Strength in unity.
It's almost like they're beginning to pull the same crap American insurance companies do, where they have policies to reject 10% of all claims regardless of validity, just to reduce expenses.
I guess I'll be using facebook marketplace from now on.
To drive app installs? Completely asinine.
I still use i.reddit.com for mobile. Blazing fast, zero ads, has most of the actually worthwhile functionality.
For now the best way is to used teddit as a front-end (if you don't post) and Dawn (ad-free, non-spamming, FLOSS app for Android if you do).
"Hey, I saw this on reddit"
When reddit recruiters or hiring managers cold reach out to you, do what I do and politely tell them that reddit's new growth strategies make working there a total non-starters. Not every company has this little respect for its users when it comes to funnelling traffic, it's completely reasonable for a native and web-app to coexist happily, even if the latter results in less lucrative ad impressions.
Because you cannot do all the reddit features on a web browser. /s It drives me crazy that everything has an app. Need a pizza, get an app.
> Unreviewed Content
> This community has not been reviewed and might contain content inappropriate for certain viewers. View in the Reddit app to continue.
But it's ok if it's unreviewed in the app. Who are reddit is reviewing subreddits?
> robbery > n. 1) the direct taking of property from a person through force, threat or intimidation. Robbery is a felony. [1]
“Screwed” is likely the word you wanted as it is a concept of justice and not criminality.
And for $4700, is likely a felony.
If they took your money and you have proof, you take them to Court and get your money back. Annoying but hardly rare in the business world.
Enforcing that piece of paper requires a further judgement and may require bailiffs and/or lawyers.
At this point you will have paid out significant costs with no guarantee that you'll get any of your money back.
It's fairly standard for small businesses to dodge debts. A company can declare itself insolvent and debts are either written off or a tiny percentage of the amount due is paid out. The directors can then start another company. Rinse and repeat.
But taking a company like Ebay to small claims is very risky anyway. It's highly likely the T&Cs - which no one reads - are vague enough to allow a variety of defences while still technically being within the law. You'd need a good lawyer to argue otherwise, and that won't be cheap.
Really, this kind of abuse should be handled at the regulatory level, with stiff penalties for systematic abuse of obligations, enforced by strong laws that don't allow for easy legal excuses.
Not really the "business world" is it though? Ebay markets itself as something any consumer can use to clear out their old stuff and make a bit of extra money. I appreciate that some people build businesses off it but that doesn't seem like what this guy was doing and he really shouldn't have to take them to court to get his money back.
This is a general forum, the verb “rob” can be used with other meanings more generally[1], “to deprive of something due, expected, or desired”.