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Comment by oofoe | Hacker News Reader

Well, acktually...

I just tried to set up an eBay account to buy an exhaust part. I created the account, sent the seller a message and twenty minutes later, I got a notification from eBay that I (and anyone from my household) was permanently banned because I was a "threat to the eBay community".

I haven't been on eBay for ages, and as far as I know, was certainly never threatening to anyone on or off eBay. Nobody at eBay would tell me what had gone wrong -- in fact, as soon as I asked what the problem was, they said that they had to "end the call now".

Maybe if I had signed up in person, they could let me know what crimes I'm supposed to have committed or at least save me a hour by not allowing the signup in the first place.

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I just had the same thing happen last week.

I’m moving away and selling some of our stuff that we can’t take with us. I have a spare 5G/LTE router that I thought I’d throw up on eBay as well as Facebook Marketplace.

I followed their onboarding process to the letter to create a listing, verify my email and mobile phone, add a bank account, etc.

About an hour later I got an email saying I’ve been “permanently suspended because of activity that we believe was putting the eBay community at risk”.

Apparently doing nothing but following their onboarding process is putting the community at risk. They also tell you that “this decision (that was made 100% by an automated system) was not made lightly”.

Get fucked, eBay.

Did they also ban every member of your family as well? That _really_ wierded me out. I'm not sure a public utility (what eBay, Amazon, et al basically are now thanks to the death of brick and mortar) should be allowed such a totalitarian response.

Somehow this hasn't stopped the people selling empty PS5 boxes and knockoff handbags at all.

The only people with working social media accounts, paypal accounts, ebay accounts are people that had them for 10 years or more. Everyone else is kicked out within a few weeks due to AI surfacing evil people.

> an exhaust part

Was it a catalytic converter?

Actually, I /wanted/ a replacement flex pipe, but the only way to get it is to buy a rear catalytic converter assembly. The one I was looking at was supposed to be new -- not "RFE" (i.e. stolen)...

Is eBay salty about catalytic converters?

It wouldn't surprise me. It's very dumb, but not surprising.

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