I created an eBay account and bought an item, today I got indefinitely suspended | Hacker News Reader

I created an eBay account and bought an item, today I got indefinitely suspended

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438 pointstommoor263 comments

A useful first step, since eBay is in California, is to exercise your California "right to know" right to obtain copies of all information eBay has on you.[1] Ebay has a procedure for this, as they are required to.[2][3] It doesn't require a login. That should yield more information.

[1] https://www.oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa#sectionc

[2] https://www.ebayinc.com/company/privacy-center/privacy-notic...

[3] https://ocswf.ebay.com/privacy

In my experience with doing data downloads from companies, they often don't contain everything, even though they're legally required to. I wouldn't be surprised if eBay doesn't include specific notes about this person's account suspension in their data dump (and I'm not sure that such information is even necessarily required to be included).

What about Paypal?

Maybe the Californian law is better enforced by the regulator (or maybe it gives you grounds to sue on your own) but keep in mind this doesn't work with the GDPR - I had a similar problem with eBay and they flat out ignored my e-mail to their DPO.

GDPR enforcement is near non-existent even for simple cases so there's no recourse for you in practice, as the regulation doesn't give you grounds to sue by yourself and you're at the whim of the (useless) regulators.

Gdpr does get enforced

https://www.enforcementtracker.com/

It just takes a long time and the entity in question will likely drag it out for as long as they can, possibly indefinitely if they've got the finances to do so.

That site lists the few cases that got investigated and enforced but misses the many that are perpetually stuck in limbo and will never get the attention they deserve.

I've had an eBay account for over 20 years. I stopped using it a few years ago, then sometime in 2022 I decided to sell something, so I logged in and posted my item. The next day, eBay sent me an email saying that my account was suspended. I tried to login, and sure enough, locked out. I just left it alone; I was pretty much already done with eBay anyway. I did nothing. Well, out of curiosity, a few months later, I tried to login to my eBay account again, and it worked fine. I was able to list items for sale again. The message telling me that my account was suspended was still in my eBay Inbox, but I never received any sort of explanation. The whole experience was pretty lame.

My guess is that since the account was idle for a few years, then the account suddenly tried selling something, so the algorithms detected this as potential fraud. That sorta makes sense. My beef, really, is that the account was suspended with no explanation and no way to "unsuspend" it, but it "unsuspended" itself, like by magic. Weird.

The bit I'll add about potential fraud is this is what a reused password from a password dump looks like.

Probably password dump and fraud attempt on eBay side. They aren’t going to explain that to hackers. I had the same thing and I managed to reactivate after I pinged support. It was rather painless than I was expecting. I don’t have a lot of love for eBay.

> They aren’t going to explain that to hackers.

The idea of security through obscurity needs to die. I wish companies shared their logic behind these decisions. Sure bad people will take advantage of it in short-term. But, in long-term, most of the loopholes should be discovered and fixed.

Fraud is not a well-bounded problem like authentication. There is no cryptographic way to prevent fraud. Using behavioral analytics is about the best you can do from behind a keyboard, and if you share the way you're measuring it, people can change their behavior to work around it. One alternative is to put more onerous restrictions on users, so that it is hard or expensive for them to buy or sell on eBay, in which case people may just buy/sell elsewhere. The other alternative is to insert more humans into the process, at which point, you start to look less like an auction website and more like an auction house.

They prevent fraud through authentication. If authentication is unreliable then behavior matters. But behaviour is more easily gamed and abused and has more false negatives affecting customers.

The process of transacting physical items has many opportunities for fraud that isn't addressed even by perfect authentication in any way. This is where eBay's tough problems arise.

I don't think it's that. I think they don't explain, anyway, at all, for anything, simply because they don't; there's no motive to do so - it's just more work.

> Probably password dump and fraud attempt on eBay side.

So then send a confirmation email when logging in after a while. If the email is also compromised, it's not eBay's problem.

I had a similar experience when I changed my ISP. When I contacted Ebay they told me the only way to unsuspend my account was to click on the link they texted to me. I told them I don't own a cellphone and haven't for several years, so who did they text. I went through 6 different tech support people, and every single one told me to click on the link they texted, even though I started the conversation saying I don't own a cellphone.

You might think the stupidity stops there, but after all this frustration, I told them to delete my entire account, all my purchase history and reviews. They told me to do so they'd have to send me a text with a verification link! After 12 different techs couldn't figure out how to do so without a text verification, I finally threw in the towel.

Ironically, after a year I decided to try and log in again. Like magic, it just worked. What a shitshow...

Modern landline phones can receive and send SMS. Your landline provider might have SMS support. Just buy an SMS capable telephone.

This is news to me. Do you have any example devices? Cursory internet search isn’t turning anything up.

Verizon, the ILEC where I am, provides a text-to-voice service if you pay for it. Basically converts an SMS to voicemail.

I guess IP phones can do SMS though.

https://www.hurriyet.com.tr/ekonomi/ev-telefonundan-da-sms-d...

https://www.onedirect.de/gigaset-e720-eu-version

https://www.quora.com/Why-was-SMS-text-messaging-never-rolle...

The news says that TurkTelekom (home landline) now (2006) has SMS capabilities. Back then the company was only landline. There was no wireless landline. I think there is still no wireless landline. (Only few years ago Avea has merged with TurkTelekom and now TurkTelekom refers to both landline phones and one of 3 mobile service providers in Turkey)

Aroud 2006-2010 I was sending SMS from my mobile phone to my coisin's landline (yes, connected with a cord to the street) and because his phone didn't had SMS support a computerazied female voice would read the SMS for free. I think it is still valid.

I think you can search for dect phone with SMS support. I was thinking to buy one few years ago but they were a bit expensive.

Sometimes there is a service you can sign up for with a website to receive and send SMS from. Sometimes the phone company calls you and reads the text to you. Sometimes the phone company sends an email to the email account on file (this sometimes happens for wireless text messages too, if undeliverable by other means…)

The front line support people follow scripts. They don’t have any latitude to be creative to handle something unexpected like “client cannot receive text messages” or to answer any questions the the script did not anticipate.

Which means the only skill the front line support people bring to the table is translating what they are told into "goto script line X". We can't be very far from an AI doing that at least as well as a human can. If true we've seen the light at the end of the tunnel, and it's a train.

Then again, Google's "we will phone the restaurant to make a booking for you" portended that a long time ago, yet we aren't there. Maybe there's hope yet.

I had a similar experience with SMS dependent processes, only that time they also required access to an old credit card number I didn't have anymore, and that the credit card company couldn't provide because it was a temporary number.

Ebay isn't alone in relying on SMS. It drives me nuts and strikes me as irresponsible. There should always be multiple options and if they SMS something they should be able to call with a code over audio.

My age old eBay account randomly got renamed, still worked, then later I found it was banned.

No notice that I ever saw , but like you I really didn’t care/ was done with eBay.

If you've been reusing that password, someone might have stolen it from other dumps. They might also redirect notifications.

I assumed the same too, but there didn't seem to be any activity on the account and the password was just a randomly generated password. It never showed up on Have I Been Pwned.

Granted, still absolutely could have been a breach, but not like i can find out.

Similar story not with eBay but with Facebook. I've had eBay for around 25 years. Never a problem buying or selling.

I signed-in to enable 2FA, review privacy settings, change the password, and review whatever content was left.

Instalocked as soon as I reached the 2FA page.

Someone through channels unlocked it for me.

Tried to review the account again.

Again, same thing. Instaban.

Ban and unban processes are generally fully automated. The issue is with the signals used to reduce false positives and false negatives, and the ambiguousness of certain situations make judgement difficult-to-impossible without the critical thinking skills of humans. In general, the scaling of human review isn't economically-achievable. Maybe platforms should encourage review volunteers in some manner or seek scaling of human review by additional means.

Plot twist: I work for Meta. Linking the personal Facebook account with work was a required step. IG, nothing much changed, except it received a private "internal" badge.

I had a fun experience too last year. After not using my account for ages I sold a few items. Was sceptical because unlike in the old days, ebay would relay the money now and keep it a few days.

However, everything worked fine, got my money, except that there was this one item where the buyer just didn't pay. When I contacted him after a week they said they're traveling and would pay a week later, so this repeated for a while until I finally have up. So I wanted to cancel the transaction, but it turned out you can only do this within 30 days. The FAQ just states after that, I should resolve the issue with the buyer. According to them, they also didn't have an option to cancel. So I had this open transaction in my ebay profile which I could only mark as payed for, but not remove in any way. Two months later it was still there. I logged in just now to check, and it is finally gone.

Ebay is full of these half-baked workflows and broken functions. It is mind boggling how even today there still seems to be at least three different UI styles, depending on what part of the site you interact with. One "modern" theme that is very flat, has no borders around anything, then a somewhat older one with more boxes and lines and smaller margins, and yet another one that looks even older.

Oh and now that I think of it, I have one stored search in my account that I cannot delete. Everytime I do and refresh the page, it is back again.

The experience for sporadic sellers is probably not very good because that's not where eBay really makes its money from. I'm happy they still allow it though; sites like Amazon have just made it impossible to work as somebody who is just trying to declutter.

You probably ended up paying commission on the unpaid item. This is why you should just not allow buyers extensions at all. Travel is no excuse. If they can send messages they can pay.

Yeah, I learned my lesson from that, but still, how do you come up with this workflow? How can I resolve anything with the buyer directly? If we agree on not doing the transaction, how would I get rid of that thing in my seller dashboard? Like, just allow cancelling it indefinitely. What's the point here!?

Also, agree on the weirdness of the buyer. What did he gain by keeping to pretend he wants the item if really he didn't? I mean I didn't care about the slowness, was just decluttering a bit, so I wasn't in a hurry or anything.

The sketchy workflow is because you were doing something you weren't supposed to essentially. Ebay doesn't want sellers to humor people doing scammy things. They were hoping you sent the item before they paid, or they didn't have the cashflow to complete the purchase but wanted to prevent anyone else from getting it.

In ebay's world, if someone is not clearly a normal buyer, you should cancel that transaction. This goes the same for consumers, if a seller is acting weird, cancel that transaction and move on.

That really is good advice for any online selling including Craigslist, FB marketplace, etc. Anyone who is acting even slightly weird is almost always just wasting your time.

However, that sounds a lot like the rationale used by eBay and PayPal to hose various peoples' accounts, which we hear about on a daily basis.

> sites like Amazon have just made it impossible to work as somebody who is just trying to declutter

Literally impossible. I am permanently banned from selling again for the offense of “inactivity”.

I had a similar 'fun' experience a few years back. Sold a desktop lab oven, and when the purchase was made something was off with the payment for shipping. Since I was a long-time buyer but inexperienced seller, I thought it was just an odd UI issue that would get sorted, but in the end, I got nothing for shipping, losing over $100. It turns out that there was some deeply hidden setting that allowed "Buyer can edit invoice", and the DEFAULT was set to "YES"!?! So, this permitted them to just eliminate the shipping cost.

I'm still absolutely baffled why any honest person with a clue would ever even think to set such a default. Or why a manager would allow it. Support was utterly unhelpful other than surfacing the setting; acting like it was completely my fault.

Instead of the flying cars we were promised, we just get another fundamentally disorganized and dishonest company.

You should see their API documentation - it belies an awful lot about their architecture. It is also truly vast. The last version I had to wrestle with was a 2000+ page PDF.

In short, it’s trash with some junk bolted on held together with garbage - insane workflows, where you can see how they started as a sleek hull and grew barnacles and then barnacles on the barnacles before sinking under their own mass, so much batch processed stuff it makes your head spin, and stuff which must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

I pity any maintainer.

> Ebay is full of these half-baked workflows and broken functions.

Their system works for 98% of transactions. They don’t care about the last 2%. At their scale though that still affects quite a few people

You're amazingly forgiving. I contact message buyers about unpaid items after 1 hour, again after 24 hours, and then at 4 days I cancel as "buyer hasn't paid"

The reminds me of an incident that made me (kind of unfairly) boycott Bed Bath and Beyond for the last few years -- I lost my wallet and didn't have credit cards for a bit, and when I tried to pay at BB&B with a check, they used a machine that told them I was too much of a risk, though I had an 800+ credit rating and thousands in my checking account. I complained and researched and eventually realized that basically all retailers use this check verification system that uses AI that considers your checks too great a risk if you don't normally pay by check -- so the idea that you can use a check in an emergency is really an idea from the last century. This bad decision by eBay seems like the same sort of thing -- machine learning teaches the AI that people who don't regularly buy and sell are far more risky than people who do (which of course they are), so new or occasional buyers/sellers look like a huge risk, and get randomly bounced.

As a business decision, are they ok with failing 9 good checks to block 1 bad check? I think most retailers would be.

Probably because they only get 2 checks per year. And the likelihood of someone trying a scam given that they are using a check is already high.

Most retailers are okay with denying all checks.

So far we’ve invented AI to make predictions based on persistence of current conditions, and another one that threatens users with misinformation. Truly, the digital future we have been promised.

Probably TeleCheck. Your credit score is irrelevant, it is likely denying you because you never use checks in that way. It's anomaly analysis. At the other end of a wire, both of these circumstances appear identical:

* a criminal who stole the checkbook of someone with an 800+ credit score and used it for a transaction the rightful owner never has

* someone with an 800+ credit score and used it for a transaction they never have

I'm not sure why anyone would use checks in an emergency though, I'm surprised BB&B even still accepts checks.

> I'm not sure why anyone would use checks in an emergency though, I'm surprised BB&B even still accepts checks.

I was taught to carry one for emergencies. If your credit card gets frozen/lost/stolen/hits its limit, and you don't have enough cash for what you need, carrying a check seems like a good backup plan. Or it did until I've now learned it's essentially useless.

Unfortunately as technology evolves our default operating procedures have to evolve too.

Take for example draining batteries until they die as the "battery health best practice". Obviously terrible advice for lithium-ion batteries.

Or advice to "never leave a car/lead-acid battery on concrete for longer than a few minutes." Which just doesn't apply with plastic/rubber shelled lead-acid batteries these days.

I'm not sure what a stop gap to replace the emergency check is, but I'm sure there are options.

> Or it did until I've now learned it's essentially useless.

That one vendor does not represent US society at large. Plenty of organizations (namely the US govt) still prefers checks. Gardeners, lawyers, and more...all take checks. I still keep a couple in my wallet for emergencies.

I only use checks in an emergency. My credit cards send me new versions within a day of reporting it lost or stolen.

I can live without anything from BedBath&Beyond for a few days. They probably assume anyone paying by check is insane.

This happened to me too, just last year.

I had an old eBay account, about fifteen years old, but I forgot even the email it was registered to, so I made a new one. Then I bought a small item I wanted, a watch strap for 20$. It had arrived and was exactly what was advertised. Cool, I thought.

Two months passed, and out of the blue my account got banned for “risk to the community” reasons. During these two months I did literally nothing on eBay, didn’t even visit the website at all. The seller didn’t contact me later, but left me a good feedback after my purchase. Like, what is this I don’t even vOv

The email about account termination said that I could appeal it, but eBay’s support portal didn’t have any links to account termination appeal process or form or contact. I tried to contact support for some other reason, chatted with what seemed to be humans, who transferred my “case” between them several times and in the end told me, in short, that “we can’t tell you what you did wrong and we will not unban you because risk things”. Weird and a little sad.

In 2014 I purchased my first phone, via eBay. Its GPS unit was basically nonfunctional (twice I left it trying to get a fix in near-optimal conditions for more than half an hour, and the best it managed was observing two satellites), which was important for me at the time (I had resisted getting a phone for years and was only finally getting one because I was going to be out in unfamiliar wilds for a few weeks). I returned the phone. The seller denied receiving it. PayPal’s vaunted Buyer Protection rejected my claim. So I ended up $150 out of pocket.

(Yes, this is somewhat irrelevant here. But I haven’t ever grumbled about this incident and this brought it to mind, as another case of the powerlessness of the individual against a Machine.)

eBay's "Buyer Protection" failed me recently too, causing me to lose about the same amount of money. I'm no longer using eBay as a result.

I’ve never had a failed return/refund which is the only reason I use eBay over Amazon or Walmart(Shopify). eBay will even refund return shipping from the seller’s account if you use the eBay return shipping label service. I don’t use eBay to sell anymore even though for electronics it used to be a really nice way to get some money back from older purchases.

Next back do a chargeback. You'll lose your PayPal/eBay account but you keep the money.

If you returned it with a tracking number that showed it as delivered, it shouldn't have mattered if the seller denied receiving it. eBay basically always sides with the buyer in that case, that's their policy. And if they didn't, you should have been able to escalate by phone to get it fixed. (I've had to do that three times over many years, and ultimately got it fixed every time I showed the tracking number proof of delivery -- I'd had to phone because the scam seller had put a fake different tracking number.)

On the other hand, if you didn't use a service with a tracking number, or didn't put the tracking number into your return, then that was your mistake. Live and learn. :(

Or -- as happened to me recently with FedEx -- the shipping company simply lied about delivering the item, you're hosed.

It's extremely common for shipping companies to mark items as delivered when they put them on the truck rather than when they're actually delivered. I've been informed that items were "delivered" two days before the delivery happened before.

That used to happen to me frequently in the past with LaserShip, when Amazon used to use them in my neighborhood. The delivery drivers were frequently given too many items to realistically deliver (I assume), and around 8:30 pm if it wasn't delivered it would still be marked as delivered.

Then it would actually be delivered some time the next day or even the day after.

I always assumed LaserShip was being paid for on-time delivery so this would have been a policy passed down from management. Thankfully, Amazon finally rolled out its own Amazon delivery vans, and the service is now way better than anything even UPS, USPS, or FedEx has ever provided.

I love that you grudgingly admit your comment isn’t that relevant but let’s be honest it felt bloody good to get it off your chest didn’t it! Goddamn eBay.

As absurd as that story is, it's not as bad as some of the shadowbans some companies do. I have an old instagram account that I didn't use for a long time, and recently I logged in because I met a local musician and wanted to add her.

Anything I try to do, I'm told "Try Again Later We restrict certain activity to protect our community."

I have validated my phone number, the account is in my actual name, and I have provided current photos, etc. My understanding is that this is a shadowban. Why? Who knows. There's no support.

Most amazingly, there are people who have followed me but I cannot follow them back. Same "Try again later".

I really hope these companies die. But it's really a shame that the executives who make the decisions to run them like this don't also suffer financially. They always walk away with a golden parachute. I don't believe in hell, but if there is one I hope they get to explore it.

I had a similar issue with Instagram. My wife and I are performing magicians, I wanted to create an account to post stuff related to our act. Before I could even log in I was informed that my account was suspended for violating their TOS. No useful information about the alleged violation, let alone no ability to remedy. Seeing as how it was a brand new account and I never got past the registration form, I don't know what I could have possibly violated.

I contacted support, received some automated replies with instructions. After following those instructions I just never heard back.

I know that Instagram is a "free" service but they obviously depend on having an active and healthy user-base ... so in that sense I guess they just doesn't want our business.

> My wife and I are performing magicians,

Very cool! Don't meet many of those :)

I had the same experience you describe with Facebook after I deleted my original account, waited years, and then had to recreate it to be able to get information about some event. I had somehow failed community standards before I had provided enough information to tell them anything. Support got me nowhere, similarly to TFA chat history.

So I tried again some months later with a phone number or email instead of the other, and it worked.

It's very discouraging to almost be forced to use a service like that to get along in the modern world. I would have paid to use it to avoid all the bs, at least for the period that I needed it.

I tried to sell on Amazon, account + all accounts with same phone number were suspended before any interaction.

We need some external arbitration if the company has a defining market share. Hope the EU tackles this next.

Arbitration regardless of market share. Does Amazon not have arbitration clauses in its seller agreements?

Those agreements usually permit the company to choose not to do business with you for any reason, including no reason. Usually that's fine since you can just use a competitor. But when a company has a significant market share and there are no realistically viable small business competitors, then consumers end up with no service for no reason. This is what I agree needs regulation.

> Those agreements usually permit the company to choose not to do business with you for any reason, including no reason.

At least for the linked article here the company isn't doing it for no reason, it's doing it for a libelous reason (calling the person a threat). Granted this libel is only published internally (pending a hack), so may not pass a legal threshold to be libel per se, but the actual reason for business termination may be arbitable.

I wonder what would happen if you get a new "recycled" phone number that had been used by someone else on ebay before.

And tracking exists for when a phone changes hands. We receive money by Zelle at times--and every established link blew up the day my account "changed" (T-Mobile/Sprint, there wasn't actually a change but it reported as such.) Why can't the other companies have access to something of the sort?

I've had my cell phone phone number for at least 15 years, maybe even 20. I wonder if I should just keep it forever even though it's from an area 2.5 hours from where I live. I think it's 2 area codes away. It also makes it easy to filter spam, I can either recognize the number (stored contact) or know it's a person actually for me (local area code) or it's spam (phone numbers area code).

at least in my experience in the USA area codes are now at most nostalgia, if not meaningless. They leak a bit of info about where you signed up, but I cannot think of a person who bothered to cycle their number to correct the area code.

Arbitration is largely a scam, though. Companies use it to avoid having to go to court where they might lose.

Edit: as a commenter downthread reminded me, I forgot to add "in the US" to this comment.

Further, in civil arbitration you must pay the arbitration agent. If the other party fails to pay the agent, they report it to the court as failed arbitration and the case is dismissed. [ Harvard Law Review ]

A world outside the US exists.

In Germany E.g. arbitration for disputes with insurance companies is free and not organized by the company in their TOS but backed by the law, E.g. in insurance.

In the US, arbitration is purely a contractual matter between the parties. So, typically, companies (almost all of them these days, it seems) will require the use of arbitration instead of the courts. And they usually get to choose the arbitrator, who derives a great deal of income from that company.

There is a lot of economic incentive for arbitrators to find in favor of the company. There is very little economic incentive for them to find in favor of the person who has an issue with the company.

Not sure forcing companies to keep customers works. At least not for retailers.

don't have to force them to keep customers, just force them to actually give users recourse for incorrect enforcement actions like htat

There's still frequent debate in the US as to whether companies can refuse to serve some customers on the basis of religion or sexual preference. So I would say there's a long wait before customers have universal decent rights.

If there were not monopolies this wouldn't be a problem. But another failure of some countries policies is in taking funding from companies and then making exceptions to let them grow into monopolies.

There's some precedence in contract law: https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/commercial-l...

If you accept me as a customer, I agree to your ToS, I rely on your service in my day-to-day business, and you later hose me by banning my account for no reason, there needs to be a remedy.

> rafaelconde: Are you a person or a bot?

> Kyla: you are currently talking with a live support

That did not answer the question!

yes it did, they implied they're a bot... but bots have personalities, they are persons, just not biologically embedded

Sometimes people are given a stupid script and have to say things like that. It's fun to try and get them to break character, harder on chat than on the phone. Or it could be a chatbot

I can't believe their words are written live, by humans. They must use decision support systems that provide them with text bricks, with "write custom answer" being one of the options.

My personal favourite is when you go to open a support chat and it makes you enter your issue into a text box. Then the chat starts, you repeat your issue to save time, and then regardless of the issue sitting on their screen twice, they ask what your issue is. I assume it’s either automatic or they’re penalized for not clicking the button that “says” it.

I always assumed so as well, but that kind of suggests they either intentionally misspelled "restriction" as "restruiction" to make it seem like you're actually talking to a human that is writing their responses, or they didn't, and nobody has ever noticed, or the tickets don't ever reach anyone who has the ability to fix the error.

I don't know. The replies are strange and sound like they're not written by a native speaker. If they had pre-selectable reply-blocks, wouldn't those be written by professionals?

I know a household brand who put up an ad on a freelancer site for $2 an hour for dev work. So there's that. On top of that, according to "The Design of Everyday Things" >>no one cares<< how things fail (e.g. copy of an error text or support message) so lesser functions, especially cost centers like support are almost always going to be off-shored.

That makes sense (well, not the $2/hr dev work), but even if you outsource the actual support, wouldn't you build the system they use?

Amazon's support that only barely understands me and sounds strange (feels like they do german <=> english translation both ways and theirs is worse than google translate) leaves a bad impression on me, so at least I care, but I'll happily admit that I'm both no one and also very much not the average customer.

Still, it just feels wrong. Granted, I've never run a support team, but I expect most of it to be repeated things. Someone's package hasn't arrived. It has arrived but was damaged. It wasn't damaged, but it contained the wrong product. Or the wrong amount of products. Or the product wasn't new. Or the product is broken, or is the wrong color etc etc. And there's not really a lot of variety in it. You find out the issue, you offer one or two solutions ("money back or resend item"), you tell the customer to have a nice day. Having pre-made blocks of well-written text to choose from (you can even have the agent choose in english and the customer gets the localized version) seems like a trivial thing, but it'll transform the customer experience from "okay, I guess Amazon only employs imbeciles" to "wow, what a nice person, and they were typing very quickly".

Large corporations are confusing to me. I'd expect someone at Amazon going "yeah, let's do that, it'll save millions and improve customer satisfaction, it's no-brainer". Yet they don't. And so I wonder: do they know something I don't ("we've tested this, people are more cooperative if the support agent is obviously non-native"), or are they just incompetent?

I visited a contact center for a major-ish online retailer once for work, and watched their processes. They had people dedicated to chat, who would operate 5 or more chats simultaneously, and in general were typing rather than copy/paste iirc. I'm sure it happens though, these guys I visited were pretty low tech.

It's often easy to see the copy paste variety happening though, e.g. in email discussions where you get sent some wall of text that's barely applicable to your situation. I've had this happen a lot with amazon and uber.

I don't mind the pre-programmed walls of text, but please don't make them too big. I got a wall of text answer out of Garmin--which promptly scrolled much of it off the screen. Unfortunately, what was left (in the window they constrained the size of!) was a coherent whole that was completely irrelevant. The relevant part had scrolled off fast enough I didn't realize there had been more.

(And I never did get anything useful out of their support, but they ended up fixing the bug.)

If they're a human who has to follow such a tight script that they can't even tell you they're a human, then they're effectively a robot anyway.

This is so true.

Sometimes even people without scripts are merely trained on a handful of expressions, and they just rotate through them.

This isn't an acceptable excuse.

Yeah, it's a script. It sucks when the script is bad though. Like one time on the phone with some company I have a card with, I was asked for my "first and last name" when an agent picked up. I answered correctly and the agent shuddered like I said something wrong and was asked for my "first and last name" again. After a while I finally answered incorrectly and gave my name as it appears on my card (which includes a middle initial and suffix in addition to my "first and last name"). I explained to her the difference between what she asked for and what she really wanted, but she didn't seem to be happy with the feedback :(

The scripts are incredibly annoying. I would rather them just short-cut to "I cannot do anything useful for you at this point, and I cannot tell you anything that would help. There is no value in continuing this conversation."

Seems reasonable for certain non-native English speakers. "You are talking with a live support [person/agent]", but support is a noun meaning "support person". Chinese developers who have introduced themselves to me usually say, "Wu Chengming, develop" instead of "developerER". (The name is made up) Also, the strange construction using the indefinite article is a feature of some non-native English.

This doesn't mean it's not a bot of course (TechSupport Syndey seems likely to claim to be a live person), although I think a bot would tend to have more commonly used grammar.

In general, people who learn a language later in life are far more prone to errors where the language has two or more words that all map to one word in their native language.

Chinese does not modify words--thus things like develop vs developer are going to be a problem. Likewise, they only have gender on family and on written pronouns--thus the problem with Chinese speakers being bad at gender.

Is the world we want to live in really the one where pursuing support from a company requires the end user to perform a Turing test on their platform's support interface?

I've said this for years: Online platforms beyond a certain size need to comply with some form of due process regulation.

If thousands or even millions of people are making a living in your ecosystem, you shouldn't be able to ruin their livelihoods arbitrarily.

This is usually done by underpaid and shockingly untrained workers doing rushed reviews of a profile and clicking the nuke button without remorse or consequence.

Not mentioned here is that ebay processes making these decisions, including bots and support, may be using external signals to make these decisions.

Have you ever caused them trouble when using the PayPal account you connected to your eBay accounts? How about with any of any of eBay’s (many) subsidiaries?

Can your email or any other personal info provided to eBay be linked to risky activity (from their perspective) if eBay uses a service to analyze that risk?

This is not to say eBay is correct or justified in blocking your account. But just noting that it’s not as simple as: 1. makes account 2. Buy product 3. Banned. — They have other signals available as well.

And their signals may well be noisy.

This is why it is infuriating. They have some model and some threshold. If an account goes over the threshold, they're banned.

For whatever reason, OP ends up over the threshold, and eBay is completely unwilling to put any customer service effort into reviewing whether they model may have misclassified OP's account. Having the service be completely off limits for a certain % of companies because it's too hard to assess errors is part of the business strategy, and it's an absolutely awful experience for the small number of people it affects.

Luckily, OP can probably live without eBay. Now imagine what happens in scenarios like these, which show up every few weeks on HN and other news media.

1. Sellers who make a living off sites like eBay who have their livelihood thrashed when model goes Beep on their account for some reason.

2. Businesses (and their customers) that rely upon cloud services that have their accounts closed indefinitely for unspecified reasons.

3. People locked out of their Gmail/similar accounts for unspecified reasons, who then lose access to every account tied to those accounts.

If you've ever been in one of these situations, it turns into a Kafkaesque dystopian runaround at best, and complete blackout at worst. I ended upon on the wrong end of an indefinite suspension from Google. I had to appeal a dozen times with no insight from them. I ultimately tracked it down to an off-by-one error on a payment card zip code. I had moved across town and my zipcode went up by one. Google didn't like that and I was a threat until I figured it out. Took months.

This is a good reminder for something that's been true about running a business, whether enormous or tiny, since forever:

If you are dependent on a single source for anything business-critical, your business is at risk. Period. This is why most companies go to great lengths to avoid that situation.

These "I got banned from X" stories happen so frequently, yet people still seem surprised when it happens. It should be obvious by now that you should not have your livelihood or business utterly dependent on a single point of failure cloud service, particularly one you don't have a formal business relationship with or any expectation of customer support. This goes for not only businesses but anything you deem valuable. Don't keep your only copy of X on a free cloud service. Don't host a critical E-mail account on a free, support-less mail provider. Don't rely on free social networking single sign-ons for access to other things you need. How many of these "I've been banned" incidents need to happen before people wise up?

And 'internal' signals that appear to be external - eg, ebay has a massive dataset of experience with your local delivery companies, and knows if they will be handling a lot of 'went missing in delivery' complaints from you.

Weird, does he say what the item was anywhere? I wonder if there are some things that are technically allowed but trigger fraud flags when newly created accounts buy them with certain payment providers. Either way, terrible customer service...

This is the most important question for me to try and understand this as well. It's a confusing piece of information to leave out, because if it's innocuous then not saying what it is is unnecessarily distracting, it it's plutonium, that might shed a different light on things

Honestly a thought that didn't occur to me on first reading.

Definitely, if I had been suspended and my only transaction was buying, say, a calculator. I'd probably be asking "Why are calculators disallowed?"

If I was buying plutonium, I'd leave that detail omitted.

Would you make a Twitter thread about it if you had been trying something obviously illegal though? Wouldn't you just silently make a fist and say "damnit, they've crossed my plans again"?

Yeah this reads like when SaaS companies complain about getting banned from AWS and leave out the part where people were using the software to run massage parlors or whatever.

These "OMG I was banned for no reason" posts are ALWAYS very low on specific details because if the specific details were included it would be obvious why they were banned.

Although in this case it's a marketplace, so shouldn't it be the seller that's responsible for selling a prohibited item?

It's not necessarily about the item in question, that's just one of several red flags, and missing pieces of information.

In any sort of 'case' like this, it's very important to have all the facts, and refrain from jumping to conclusions.

Thank you... had to scroll a little too far to find this type of comment.

People are very quick to jump on the outrage bandwagon.

It was an iPhone 2G according to the OP.

No, it's because if the specific details were included then the posters would be doxing themselves. It's very easy to lookup sold listings on eBay.

What an incredibly bizarre comment - What's sort of harm comes from someone knowing your ebay account name? Come on, now.

He does not and that's generally a huge red flag. So many times over the years I've dug into stories like this, and it turned out the person was trying to trade something very much not permitted by the ToS, and they knew it.

People who are challenging the ToS themselves are generally up front about what they are trying to trade, arguing that it ought to be allowed.

That said, this corporate approach of 'you are permabanned and we are not going to explain why because security' is just bullshit, essentially corporate dictatorship. Would you accept living in a country where you could be arrested, but all legal details would be withheld to prevent future crime? Of course not (I hope...though some would). The fact that this behavior has become standardized among tech companies is a major negative strike for the securocrat mindset and the prioritization of profit over anything resembling ethics. If you work for a company that has a policy like this, or uphold such policies, you are part of the problem.

I find it extremely strange that a company would encourage a credit card dispute. Wouldn't that affect the standing of eBay with credit card processors?

Not if the company knows they will win the dispute. It's an easy way to get rid of the complainer and send them to annoy someone else.

That's not how it works. Even the act of having a customer dispute you hurts you are a merchant, so it's better for the merchant to avoid them entirely.

A lot of payment processors will charge regardless of outcome.

Stripe's docs, for instance, mention this:

> Once a cardholder initiates a dispute, it is no longer possible to avoid the fee.

https://support.stripe.com/questions/dispute-fees-faq

Additionally, according to Stripe at least, these disputes will remain on your "record" with the particular network:

> All disputes, whether they’re won or lost, count towards your dispute rate, so the best strategy to avoid monitoring programs is dispute prevention.

https://stripe.com/docs/disputes/measuring

Even if the customer withdraws the request, it still counts and you still have to pay the fee.

I'm sure eBay has better terms with looser thresholds, but even they are not impervious to the dispute system. At some point the networks can say "nah, we'd rather not deal with you" and there isn't much eBay could do about it.

Yes, if people raise a lot of disputes it causes your processing fees to go up.

Kayla did say eBay would "accept" the dispute though, so maybe there's some sort of process that makes it a refund?

Typically when you make a dispute the CC company reaches out to the vendor. The vendor can then make their case. Sounds like eBay was saying they wouldn't: they would just accept the loss. I believe they'd still be dinged though, as the first step of filing a dispute is "Yes, I have tried reaching out to the vendor first."

Still, how likely is it that someone in customer support (Kyla) would have any involvement in those in fraud/finance (who presumably would respond to the dispute)?

It sounds like an "unofficial" attempt to help, which can be disastrous. Kyla may KNOW that almost all credit card disputes go through because Ebay just eats them as the cost of business, but it may ALSO be the case that it could trigger something that makes them ban everything.

Think of the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R8GtrKtrZ4

> Sounds like eBay was saying they wouldn't

They will. I was defrauded for a few hundred bucks by credit card thieves acting as me on ebay. eBay has a legal department that will fight you to the end of the earth when you file a dispute against ebay. I would contest something and they would send 40+ file packets explaining why I was wrong. Even though it was lies it takes forever to painstakingly prove 40 pages of lies. Eventually the bank doesn't want to deal with it anymore, there's a committee that spends maybe 10 or 15 minutes on your case and it takes 400 pages of truth to disprove 40 pages of lies, and denies your dispute and you have to sue.

The best part is the pirates made the username 'piratearrgggghhhh@hotmail.com' or something to that effect as well as a tracking number for something shipped (to my city) an entire day before the purchase date and ebay included that in their discovery packet.... and ebay suspended the seller account for fraud .... I still lost lol.

They've got enough volume to absorb the occasional dispute.

Companies as large as eBay can make the credit card processor eat disputes as part of the agreement to use them (just like Costco is large enough to make Visa eat the entire credit card processing cost to have the Costco card).

They don't absorb it.

I was the victim of credit card fraud and someone set up another ebay account under my name, which then "bought" items from yet a second fraudulent ebay seller as a way to collect the ill-gotten credit card funds. I disputed the fraud with my bank.

eBay fucking PILED and PILED on the paperwork to my bank, both at the initial and every appeals step I used to attempt to win the dispute. Fought them tooth and nail over a few hundred bucks. I ended up losing because they had a legal department going ham to make sure I would lose the credit card dispute where they had lawyers working 40+ hours a week vs whatever time I have on the side to fight a few hudred bucks. If you file a dispute with ebay it is like filing a dispute against an army of lawyers, good luck.

"Absorb" here doesn't mean "they won't fight it", it means they'll have a manageable chargeback rate that doesn't risk them getting cut off from credit card processing.

I had a case recently where a company recommended that I kick off a credit card dispute. But it was because the company was calling in the administrators, and therefore they wouldn't have any reputation or assets very soon anyway.

It seems possible that (since they've already reached the point of paying), the seller will go ahead and ship the order. Maybe the customer service rep (CSR) is just a very imprecise communicator and means to do the dispute if a problem does arise.

(Other signs that the CSR is an imprecise communicator: (1) they called the suspension "indefinite" at one point and "permanent" at another, but these are different things, and (2) they said "all" new members get suspended, but they may have meant this happens fairly often and is pretty routine.)

Another possibility is that the CSR simply didn't pay close attention and try to understand the situation. When the customer said they wanted to check the status, I think they meant it literally. They don't know that there's necessarily a problem yet, but they want to be able to check. The CSR may have concluded that the customer has an actual issue with never receiving the product.

> If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.

As we become numerous (and our access to eachother grows) we also become more expendable. For every person they lockout there is 10 more signing up. Just wait till not only is the AI making the decision, but negotiating with it is the only remedy (no humans involved). I predict one of the next great atrocities, like the authoritarian ones of the 20th century, will actually be from a nameless faceless entity hooked up to a decision point that leads to life or death for individuals. It probably will be somewhat subtle, like maybe a decision about sustenance

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9402-if-you-want-a-picture-...

Someone in the Twitter replies astutely asked why the graphic shows 'Kyla's side of the chat, since every messaging app places the owner's text on the right hand side, and the respondent's on the left. I just logged into eBay and it's the same there - suggesting that this entire exchange is faked.

Someone replied to that comment suggesting that's what happens when you export the chat session. I've never talked to Ebay support, can you try with your case and check?

I see no such option, and I'm going to start a fake dispute to see if one appears. I doubt eBay web app is exporting chat sessions in jpeg format.

eBay Twitter account responded to that thread, and they didn't claim that it's faked, just doubled down:

https://twitter.com/AskeBay/status/1628774965800583168

Corporate accounts never engage with a dispute issue in public. I don't think that means anything.

It really depends. I've seen corporate accounts calling out customers for not actually submitting a complaint or lying about it before.

That surprises me, but I'll keep it in mind.

I suppose Ebay is the place that UX-norms go to die. It's a real chat

Sounds exactly like what happened with me and PayPal (guess they still share that).

Transferred a few hundred bucks to a PayPal account I hadn't used in a while. Got banned with no option for reinstatement or explanation. They basically just kept my money and said there was nothing I could do about it kthxbai.

I understand verification for anything flagged as risky. I hadn't used the account in years so I can see why it might show up that way. But no, there's no way to verify my identity or speak with anyone who can tell me anything. That money just went poof (for me at least).

Usually PayPal gives you your money back after 180 days (after it is mostly chargeback-proof). Was that not even an option here?

Dammit, there was this post here on HN a while back how someone got their account back through the forced arbitration process. So if you care enough about that money, that would be an option. Hopefully someone can find it again, I'll keep looking some more.

EDIT: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/i-fought-the-paypal-and-i...

You can report them to government agencies for theft.

Same kind of issue. Signed up for PayPal, instantly banned before I could even do anything. Email support just said there is no recourse and no explanation why. Ended up ringing the support phone number and they managed to unban the account.

Suggest you submit a complaint to the CFPB - there is a webpage and useful instructions for doing so. Ebay is a regulated financial institution and will have to answer to the CFPB as to how they will be resolving your complaint.

You can also submit a complaint to your state financial regulator - they usually have more teeth than the CFPB but take a little bit more time.

I had an issue with Paypal for 5-6 years because I paid a kid in Indonesia $50 for a sketch, realized Paypal had charged a transaction fee despite documentation showing they wouldn't, and tried to send another $10 to cover the difference.

They asked for and got a bunch of documentation out of me until they kept asking for more and more and, eventually, I declined to participate in the process any further.

It came up every year or so that it'd be nice to have a working Paypal account, so I'd try and fail to resolve it.

Anyway, about a month ago, I tried again and got in touch with someone who was able to understand that there was no way that my largely inactive account would be "more secure" if I sent them credit card statements (since the card originally linked to the account was long expired and there was no way I was sending them statements for a new card when they clearly had internal information-handling issues...at least from my perspective). She verified my physical and email address and removed the block.

By the time the CS rep had resoved the issue, I'd worked around the problem again, so I still haven't used the account, but, at least for Paypal, it does seem like they've empowered folks to fix silly problems.

It might be worth trying again.

I had the same thing happen to me. I signed up to ebay for the first time, sold a single item before I had everything filled out (I was surprised at how fast my inventory moved). I couldn't enter in my payment information (Chase Bank) and my SSN wouldn't validate on their website for whatever reason. In fact, it seems like I am in this predicament because the website wouldn't function properly. Now I am out the several thousand dollars for the inventory I moved and I have no course of reconciliation. Any attempts at customer service end up in useless call centers who "cannot help me as we need to reduce fraud in their marketplace". Fraud? I sold and shipped the item. They must need money so bad they took mine.

For what it's worth, the phrases …

> how fast my inventory moved

… and …

> for the inventory I moved and I have no course of reconciliation

… don't sound like an individual trying to yard sale a used item. They sound like a seasoned seller complaining about a channel.

First time seller listing a bunch of used receipt printers I had lying around that I couldn’t figure out how to ecycle.

Why would you list something before finishing setting up your bank account info?

Even worse, why would you ship something before that?

And why would you start on eBay with an item of several thousand dollars which is waaay higher than 99% of items? I'm surprised anyone would even consider buying something at that price when you had zero positive feedback or any reputation at all.

None of this makes any sense to me.

It seems reasonable to me. I've bought things on ebay many times but never sold anything. I was thinking about selling something recently and didn't even think that adding a bank account for payout would cause any problems (because why would it? I've never had any issues linking my bank account to venmo, paypal or any other third party)

It was their exact signup funnel.

- Sign up.

- List a product.

- Use seller hub (it’s free)!

- Enter in payment details (don’t worry you have until the end of the month!).

I was assuming my product would take a while to sell (used receipt printers). They sold almost instantly after I listed them so I had to catch up. I never made it to step 3. I didn’t want to cancel the order because it was my first one and oddly enough didn’t want that to be the reason my account got suspended.

There were so many problems in the eBay backend I encountered only after my items were in transit. I couldn’t add _any payment method_ until my order was received and then I was promptly suspended without warning (before the month they said I had was even up).

"Once again this is Maria Kyla." - just in case anyone had any doubts. For some reason the mere tone of the support person's communication makes me think of chinese eBay/Ali-X retailers' made-up names used in support requests in order to appear more appealing and "familiar" to western customers. During my 7-8 years of buying stuff off of AliExpress I've been on the thankful receiving end of support from "Windy" (Wendy), "Marry" (Mary), "Magret" (Margaret) and "Amily" (Emily) to name just a few.

That's not the issue though, that's just a simple courtesy, would you be happier if they used their original name, perhaps in unreadable (to me) chinese characters?

On amazon you get company names and addresses like shenzhenshihenghongxingkejiyouxiangongsi at LONGHUAQUGUANLANJIEDAOGUANLANHUANGUANZHONGLU370HAO.

and it is perfectly readable and can be translated back into chinese, for instance this can be translated into 深圳市恒宏兴科技有限公司 at 龙华区观澜街道观澜湖安关中路370号

but it did look like someone touched their yubikey by accident.

Yeah, people tend to not be as happy with someone they can't see as a person--and not being able to say their name is part of that.

Absurd statement in the context of chat/e-mail support. Of course you're not gonna get to see what the staff looks like. And no customer ever became happier nor felt more "connected" with the advent of first-name basis support staff in chat/e-mail instead of anonymous styled "you're talking with Support, how can I help you?", just like no customer is ever impressed with sales people gussying them up by repeating their name during conversation. It's just product packaging, not a support quality bump.

No, nor would I be sadder. Most of them do present their names in kanji, and it makes absolutely no difference at all to how the e-mail/chat support errand will progress.

eBay outsource their customer service to Filipino workers.

Ebay is terrible.

I once sold a nice (and expensive) smartphone on ebay. The buyer complained that it did not arrive as described. The phone was fine, but whatever, I thought ebay would just refund the payment and have the buyer return the phone, right? Nope, ebay refunded the buyer and let them keep my phone! No recourse... nothing. Ebay let the buyer steal my phone!

That’s standard. This scam is nearly 2 decades old, except back then it was done via PayPal. I think you’ll find more by searching “PayPal chargeback scam”

This is exactly why they have an itchy finger on the ban button for new accounts.

There is no easy solution to the "I got a brick in the mail" problem, from either the buyers or the sellers side.

I am able to buy, but not able to sell.

eBay say I am connected to a dodgy account that was last active years ago. I am not connected to it - but must be some IP match or fingerprint from shared office or the like.

Zero ability to feedback or get anywhere from eBay.

The logic is rubbish as well, I am dodgy so stop me from selling... but fine to buy?! How?!

eBay - sort your shit out.

eBay is a master class on how to get worse every year.

I used to sell there, but it's just so hostile now, to both buyers and sellers. Particularly sellers, though.

I think eBay has always been terrible. The website was awful and it went downhill fast after 2007 I think.

I still remember how I was able to include javascript and CSS that affected the whole page in 2005. Good times. I was using the former to enable Clippy in IE

Amazing.

I think it was always a pretty shit website, but now the policies have caught up.

They're like a governmental beauracracy now.

> careful deliberation and investigation

After 2m. Lol.

Here’s what happens:

    1. Service launches
    2. They get loaded with scams
    3. They implement safety mechanism
    4. Repeat cat and mouse game until the list of “if/else ban” reaches the distance between moon and earth

Basically all of these transactional companies lock themselves into corners and make life hell for everyone.

It happened with PayPal, it happens with eBay and it’s starting to happen with Stripe.

They normally do that if they think you have another ebay account.

Are you sure you didn't have an account from years ago somewhere?

If they have any evidence of you having two accounts, they will ban all except the oldest one. And they will refuse to tell you this.

If you have a father/mother with an identical name (happens frequently in some communities), then you have to share an account with your father/mother to not hit this restriction.

When will companies learn that full names are almost never unique?

Not true you can have multiple accounts i have multiple storefronts on ebay with totally different accounts linked to different emails but with the same primary address

Not true - eBay doesn't disallowed multiple accounts. At one time it was considered "professional" to buy and sell with different accounts. Specifically, don't buy using your seller account. I have one account for buying and one for selling myself. There's zero hiding it - my name is globally unique.

https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/identity-policies/multipl...

>Can I use one account for buying and one account for selling? Do the same policies apply to each? Yes, you can use the accounts in whatever way works best for you. Buying and selling policies apply equally to all accounts though, so you'll need to meet our buyer and seller standards across all your accounts.

I had an account on a popular gaming platform banned for fraud. Fortunately, I knew devs on the team, and they dug into it and found a bug. Account unbanned.

Meanwhile, support wouldn't tell me anything. Final suspension, we will tell you nothing, there is no more information, etc.

I have a very dim view of this type of filtering. If it's a bug in eBay's systems, they will never fix it.

Considering that eBay actually forbids sellers to sell the same unique item outside of eBay when it is listed on eBay then it is a very concerning behavior. In this case it looks to me that the person on the eBay side got somehow offended by the tone of replies and wanted to have revenge.

Seems ... not legal

Where does eBay actually say that? I looked and couldn't find that. There are many people who crosslist with ebay and other sites. In fact, there are programs that help companies to crosspost in bulk.

Perhaps I have too strong interpretation and you can list it elsewhere but you are prohibited in any way indicate this possibility on the item page or during the communication between the seller and buyer.

Twitter isn't much different. Create new account, make a first post, banned. They want your phone number or to solve a puzzle, I did neither and uninstalled. Not as extreme as that chat support or lack thereof but it seems to be a trend.

> banned. They want your phone number

That isn't very surprising since Twitter was lying about accounts being locked for suspicious activity just so they could get your phone number for targeted advertisement.

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/05/twitter-p...

I've had my eBay account suspended two or three times. All of them was because of suspicious activity in that I was using a VPN. I had to connect with someone on their customer support team to get it unlocked. I guess that's understandable if someone else using the same IP address is doing something malicious, but I think this could all be avoided if they set up sane 2FA measures.

Just yesterday I logged in and it prompted me to choose how to receive a code - email or SMS. I chose email, received the code then entered. Then, they told me I had to authenticate again via SMS.

I really wish they would implement standard software based TOTP so I could use something like Aegis or passOTP.

I had a similar experience with DeepL recently. I made a personal account using their free plan to try out their API. My account was banned before even completing the signup flow, and customer support had no details they could provide me.

Ebay is going down hill- I recently foolishly purchased a too cheap item, and then did more research and saw it was a fraudulent listing. I contacted ebay support, they told me to contact the seller as they were not the a tual seller and “could not cancel it”, and that if it was fraud I should use their reporting system. I did, they quickly removed the item, but STILL REFUSED TO REFUND ME - I have an email from their fraud team alerting me that the listing was fraudulent, but they are happy to keep holding my money for another 7 days, in case the fraudulent item actually ships… insanity

Completely insane. I found recently when I tried to make a new twitter account to tweet at a local customer support account that I was immediately suspended. I didn't post anything incendiary or rude.

My theory is that a lot of these sites have become so saturated that most people who are going to sign up already have, and the vast majority of new signups are all spam accounts. So the companies respond by making it more and more difficult to make a new account. The irony is that there is almost certainly another team at the company, if not multiple, dedicated to getting new user signups.

I had the same experience buying a charger for my razer. I created an account to buy this very specific charger from a Chinese seller and my account was immediately closed a few hours later. After constant back and forth with their customer service, they basically said that my account was permanently banned from using their service and that I wouldn't be able to use eBay ever again. I kept asking what I did wrong and they wouldn't tell me. The representative that I was speaking to even knew that I did nothing wrong and was telling me that they were sorry because it was beyond their control and that their manager was telling them not to pursue the matter any further because they themselves could get into trouble.

Fast forward about two years after the incident, I randomly remembered it and decided to ring up their customer service to see if they'd unban my account. The customer service rep unbanned with no problem and when I asked what the issue was, they told me that they sometimes ban new accounts with suspicious activity and that fresh new accounts have a very high chance of committing some sort of fraud.

While it's nice that I got unbanned after two years, I will never be using eBay ever again if I can help it. Even if they offer the cheapest price on a product, I will purposefully pay more elsewhere.

I'm not sure what happened, but I make sure to not use VPN because a lot of e-commerce website will ban you if your IP is coming from VPN. Or it could simply be that the IP address happens to be on a blacklist, probably because someone was using that IP address for doing something fishy (which sucks even more since we most likely share IP address which is rotated by ISP). Or it could be geographical issue... I remember I couldn't even load Homedepot.com from oversea, as homedepot web server was blocking the entire country for hacking.

I signed up using my real details and a few days later I got an email saying I was banned for life for suspicious activity. They wouldn't explain why, just that this decision was irreversible.

Something similar happened to me with Twitter way back in the day, maybe 2016 or 2017? I made an account, followed some famous people, and then got an email saying my account was suspended and the only way to unlock it was to scan my drivers license and send it to them. Since there's no way I'm providing that to twitter, I just abandoned it, maybe a bookmark folder and some bookmarks, and that's that.

The fraud algorithms at all of these sites are very sensitive and you can be locked out of a service for literally no reason.

Exact conversation I had with support after they suspended me after I sold something for the first time, but before I mailed the item. Its like they just randomly permanently suspend people.

The support questions seemed interested in the account's address. I wonder if that address was in a restricted country, known mail forwarding vendor, or PO Box?

To be clear, I think the way this was handled and tech company's whole "we cannot tell you why" stuff is unacceptable. But typically we can make a fairly reasonable guess why they might restrict the account, we just need more information (e.g. VPN? What was the item? Is your address unusual? PayPal account's history?).

Me too. Definitely a possibility that they live at an address associated with a scammer, or that address is on some restricted list.

>>Thank you for choosing eBay

>>Take care bye

>>>I am sorry it was not appealed.~Olga

I love it, it's like a Monty Python Movie :)

It's worse than that "Hi there! I am sorry to hear your account is suspended.Due to limited verification process here we aren't able to review suspended accounts.Our support always review all the details on the account before providing the final decision. I am sorry it was not appealed.~Olga"

surprised they let their twitter support team freehand these instead of using macros. "Person has been banned and is upset" copy/paste

I imagine if/when this story hits tech news outlets, someone in the eBay management chain will be regretting that response. No reply at all would genuinely be better for them than something so half-baked and kafkaesque.

I opened an eBay account and sold an item, buyer immediately canceled. eBay asked me to add a bank account again (it was already registered) even though the money was still held by eBay. Website would not let me add the bank account so eBay told the buyer to open a case, which was immediately settled in his favour, as expected. A few days later, on Christmas day, they banned me from selling. But kindly allowed me to continue buying. Fuck eBay.

I wonder what it was that he purchased?

I am sad that eBay deletes inactive accounts. I lost all the historic feedback I had because I didn't go back in within 30 days of notice. I don't know that it's necessary to do that. How much disk space could a list of account names take up in an indexed database table?

It's not you, it's them. I've been 'indefinitely suspended' thrice from eBay. Whenever their extra secret suspension metrics DB gets an update, your suspension reasons are discarded, and you can appeal to reopen your business. I've found 'indefinitely' is about 4 years.

Interesting idea, if you're in the EU: when they ban you, ask them to delete your PII. Either you get unbanned because they're no longer storing the fact that they banned you, or they need to provide a reason for storing it against your expressed wishes. "We want to, lol" will probably not fly, so I expect they'd need to give some info on the reason of the ban. If it's law-related ("you're on a blacklist from the government, but we can't tell you"), you'll get a hint. If they just say "our magic ML blackbox predicted the probability of fraud was above average", I doubt that will be considered a valid reason. If they actually have a valid reason (e.g. someone with the same name already had an account at that address), you'd at least know what's up and can fight that head on.

I don't know though, maybe they'll just tell you to get lost and that they're not going to delete it and also not tell you why, and then just pay a $50 fine 5 years down the line when some data protection agency finds the time to do something.

Just FYI, I was in the same situation and did so and they never got back to me. GDPR enforcement is almost non-existent (especially in cases where they need to investigate and potentially litigate instead of sending canned replies) in my country (and most others by the looks of it) so there's nothing you can do in practice.

Sad to hear. It's annoying when you get a bunch of new regulation that is self-selected-enforcing and only the law-abiding citizens and companies will follow it while others ignore it without consequences.

It's spotty in Germany, since it's set up at the state level and depends on where the company is located. In my experience, Hamburg's DPO is terrible, slow and mostly unwilling. Berlin's is very slow but not incompetent. Hesse's is quick and responsive and feels like they have a good understanding of tech and want to get things done.

Twitter has a similar on-boarding process.

I helped someone set up a basic account. It was immediately suspended until they allowed their phone number to be added "for verification". ...

Slightly off-topic, but I'm curious if anyone knows the best established way to accept payment for items sold+shipped through sites like ebay.

I've heard enough horror stories from sellers claiming they'd shipped items only to have the buyer falsely claim it never arrived or wasn't what was advertised to get reimbursed/chargeback, and never return the item or return a box of rocks.

This has prevented me from selling anything online outside of in-person CL sales for over a decade now. Ages ago I sold many things on ebay that were shipped without difficulty, accepting paypal, none of this fuckery, but times have changed.

Is there a safe way to do this sort of business as a seller today? It really sucks to not have access to the broader market for selling some niche items, esp. in my rural region w/low population density.

I had a similar situation happen with Mercari last year. I bought some used audio equipment and 30 minutes later my account was terminated for "prohibited items or conduct". I still wonder every now and then what part of the listing triggered the banhammer. Guess who never used Mercari again?

I'm curious about the background here. It certainly seems bad, but I could imagine quite a few scenarios where this is expected. One would be making a second account to bid on your own item.

I want to make the point, I'm not accusing him. I just am curious about the background.

Perhaps his name matched someone on a US government sanctions list? eBay is a US company after all.

This definitely is a data privacy issue. They collect your data any they use it in some mathematical model to assess risk with some poorly thought out proxy, and boom: a bunch of people get falsely classified as risks to the platform. It's like the value added model for teachers, and Cathy O'Neil addresses this in Weapons of Math Destruction.

This is like playing Elder Scrolls… lol

"Let's talk about something else." "Goodbye"

Same thing happened to me as a seller. I sold a single Nintendo Switch game for a very normal price ($30, used). I delivered the item on-time and with tracking. My account was suspended forever with no chance for review.

I had something similar happen to my account as well. I can't bid in any auctions on eBay though I can do Buy It Now. The restriction came out of nowhere and has been on my account for years with no explanation.

I have had a similar experience, submitted an auction bid once but for some reason couldn't log back in into my ebay account for a week, looks like e-bay wasn't interested in getting my money :).

I've had a similar problem - signed up, provided all real details (they actually do a soft credit-check at least in the UK so that should've succeeded) and verified a phone number, listed some low-value specialised computer hardware that's definitely not a good bait for scammers (you'd be lucky if you got any buyers at all, so a scammer would definitely not list something like that if their objective was to scam) and yet the next day all the items were gone and account suspended.

I've had this happen twice to me. Once when I started selling things from a long standing account. Again when I was selling and they just closed it.

I got exactly the same lack of explanation each time. T&C's say that I can't open another account but my new accounts have the same address associated with it.

Crappy situation when it's your business, although you are allowed to have multiple accounts.

The same happened to my girlfriend with her EA account: just created it and the next day it was suspended, without any explanations or review options.

Same thing happened to me with Activision.

Found out one day my account was randomly banned from playing Warzone 2.0 with absolutely no way to get it unbanned.

Similar thing happened when I returned to playing Rust after a long break. I had even just upgraded my HDD specifically to get Rust to load faster. Maybe 2 days after upgrading my HDD I get a VAC ban on it(my only VAC ban) for no apparent reason from their third party anti cheat software Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC). I tried to appeal to EAC but they won't give any info. I think what could have set it off was either 1) the hard drive upgrade 2) maybe my anti-virus since it once tried to sandbox it and run it virtualized or 3) EAC scanned my hard drive and found that I have unrelated source code/python scripts on it since I'm a dev.

w/e I'm done with it but I don't like having a VAC ban on my account for no reason :/

Yes but he doesn't say what he was trying to buy. Drugs? Guns? Money laundering? There's got to be more to the story here...

In the screenshotted chat he says he's planning to buy old/vintage stuff.

Why would that even matter? If eBay approved/listed the item he was buying from another user, it should be fine to buy. This wouldn't make it HIS fault? If anything, it would suspend the person listing the item.

yeah good point. his account shouldn't be suspended as a buyer; it'd be the seller at fault. Really, it would be eBay's fault for letting a seller list a disallowed item.

I can confirm that last part. I've bought many CD keys for games and software off Ebay and each time the seller gets removed within 24-72 hours, but it has never affected my account.

This is strange. I've had an eBay account since 1999. I've used it very irregularly over the years - sometimes I'm buying things regularly, occasionally I'll do a "burst" of selling for a few months, then go for years without selling anything. I've never seen anything remotely like this suspension.

I'm honestly looking forwards to the EU digital identity. From both the user and the developer side I don't want to deal with a process where one can either spawn a million accounts in 5 minutes or be subjected to validation processes full of false positives and negatives.

Investing in startups with many free users who might not be people?

Can anyone offer insights into why the eBay website is so bad for sellers? They're a multibillion dollar business. It doesn't just look old, there are many basic missing features, integrations are feeble (such as the recently discontinued Shopify connection), and there are so many stupid workarounds required.

My guess is that it was hacked together and they piled hacks upon hacks for decades. There’s no chance anyone can or wants to fix that. Let’s not forget it came out in 1995 so the codebase must be a nightmare now.

My complete guess is that their system thought you looked like the seller trying to artificially inflate their auction.

A quick Google search says that as of 2021, only 12% of products are sold by auction. They're so obsessed with competing with Amazon with the "buy it now" system that auctions may be an afterthought.

Etsy should eat eBay's lunch. eBay's site is pretty cruddy, they seem to think it's cool that sellers inflate shipping costs (often to hilarious extents), and now it's become easy to get stuck in some kind of authentication loop or even get suspended.

Speculating but when any online companies do this, that usually is because the users IP or Phone Number are marked as “unsafe” by some data providers. As both of them can be recycled, it puts customers in weird situations like this

that's super lucky

I have never been able to buy anything from eBay successfully, either it's fraud, or customs-postage get so fucking idiotic they demand more in fees than the cost of the item... never again, not like it ever worked for me

Like the time when I bought an antique desk for $0.01, but the postage was $200.

Still a good deal, but that was pretty silly.

That was back when eBay was charging fees on the purchase price but not on shipping

Happened to me, too. Now I just use Ebay as a guest when I need to, otherwise avoid. I got told it was irreversible after I: created an account, bought some dc/dc converter modules for like 10$.

I wonder if there’s some perverse incentive to block accounts and there’s a “# accounts suspended for fraud” dashboard somewhere. Suspending new accounts is likely the easiest because they put up the least fuss.

I guess there may be a thriving market of second-hand accounts with good reputation, or "will buy or sell your shit for a percentage" services, with helpful support like this.

…and BigTech™ continues to DOS itself out of existence, fine by me!

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It is basically up to eBay whom they do business with.

... of course, wasting potential new customers' time by having them set up an account and then cancelling it is a bad user experience.

It's been about a decade since last time I bought on eBay, for me trust is very important and I don't trust eBay anymore since then.

"Careful deliberation" was 2 minutes? lol

I dunno about the reasons, but this chat session looks unutterably dumb.

Why ask those questions if they have no bearing on the result?

Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long, long time. Does anyone here find eBay useful anymore?

I buy stuff all the time from eBay. At this point, I have more trust in individual ebay sellers than I do in Amazon's weird, pooled product system whereby you have no idea if you're getting a legit product.

In the war Humans vs Bots, the Bots won and they have taken our place.

Whenever I chat (on ebay or on my phone), my messages are on the right, and the other persons messages are on the left.

My question therefore is, "Is this a real situation and a real chat?" There is really no information given.

Do a Google image search for “ebay chat” and you’ll find other examples that look like that, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/HumansBeingBros/comments/8jej1d/eba....

This may be the desktop browser version.

Why do believe a twitter post that you haven't verified, but you disbelieve someone who tested this?

I already did an ebay chat before I commented. Doing that I saw that my comments were always on the right. That's what I wrote in my comment that you replied to. My chat was on the desktop browser version.

Ebay may have a different chat mechanism that works like the twitter post, but the ones I've tried do not work that way.

Given that, the twitter post and the reddit you linked appear to be people poorly spoofing ebay chats.

I didn’t disbelieve you. You didn’t mention desktop browser, and that was only my guess. The link I posted also was just one example, image search yields more examples. What I provided is likely evidence that Ebay chats can indeed look like that.

Here is another example (about two thirds down the page): https://www.autods.com/blog/dropshipping-tips-strategies/inc... Why would that blog article fake an ebay chat? Why would all the examples fake the chat in the same way?

> Here is another example (about two thirds down the page): https://www.autods.com/blog/dropshipping-tips-strategies/inc...

That's a good find. It's possible that these are from a different chat mechanism or are old. I put more stock in that page than I do for a post on reddit or twitter. Your page has quite a bit of explanatory background information, unlike the social media posts.

This is how desktop chat appears for me. https://ibb.co/WzLH6Yg . The blue Hello box on the right is my typing, which shows a definite difference from what is shown on the Twitter post. I used ibb to upload the image, since it was the first google result for uploading images.

That screenshot looks like a mobile UI though.

It's not, though. Here's a wider version showing the browser heading and tabs.

https://ibb.co/fdg7Qhz

> Why do believe a twitter post that you haven't verified, but you disbelieve someone who tested this?

This is a strange statement. You're a 100% anonymous HN commenter. Nobody has "verified" your comment either. It's just your word and nothing else.

The linked tweet is from someone who is much — as in infinitely — more known than you.

The reason to believe the tweet is simple: Occam's razor. It could be an elaborate hoax, but what would be the motive for that?

Isn't that the point, though? It's easy to verify how ebay chat works. Then, there won't be a need for appeals to authority, comparing people's reputations as "verification", or other logic errors.

> It's easy to verify how ebay chat works.

It's actually not. I just signed in to my ebay account for the first time in a long time, and I had to verify by both email and SMS before I could do anything, which is a pain and made me regret this whole endeavor. And it turned out that I never needed to contact ebay support, so I had no chat transcripts.

Moreover, this assumes there's only one way that ebay chat works, when there are multiple platforms, browsers, apps, etc.

I already wrote twice that there could be a different chat mechanism, so there is no need to keep telling me that there could be more than one chat mechanism. Please read before posting. To illustrate my point, I also uploaded a similar looking chat that is visually reversed in my sibling comment. At first and even second glance, when people don't carefully read first, it may not be easy to see.

> It's easy to verify how ebay chat works.

> I already wrote twice that there could be a different chat mechanism

In other words, it's not so easy.

Now that you've resorted to condescension, I'm done here.

That makes no sense. You were repeatedly telling me what I had already written. Pointing that out isn't condescension.

Anyway, I was simply pointing out that when I use ebay chat on phone or desktop it looks different from what appears to be a fake chat on twitter. Sorry, for your taking that the wrong way. I hope you have a nice day.

My guess is that OP isn't giving us all the details. Most likely he's engaged in some untoward behavior elsewhere and has ended up on a high risk list.

These services are actually really great at reducing fraud for sellers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

> Thanks for choosing eBay

People are still using eBay?

the only thing worth using at ebay are the tiny classified ads

im going to guess you were using a vpn.

eBay must be run by Reddit mods

Blacklist?

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