[HN Gopher] Tell HN: I was permanently banned from eBay in one hour
___________________________________________________________________
Tell HN: I was permanently banned from eBay in one hour
I have some extra electronics around my house that I'd like to sell
so I signed up for an eBay account. In one hour I posted 6 listings
totaling less than 500GBP. I received an email that my account was
suspended. I was told to call eBay. I have called twice and been
told that I am banned from selling on eBay for life with no ability
to appeal or hear the reason for my ban. I am not allowed to create
a new account. On both phone calls I asked to speak to a
supervisor. In both cases the agent promptly hung up on me. Don't
use eBay. They collected a ton of my sensitive information
(address, phone, bank account, etc) and then insta-banned me
without even having the courtesy to explain why or let me appeal.
Author : bannedfromebay
Score : 334 points
Date : 2022-05-08 16:11 UTC (6 hours ago)
| logicalmonster wrote:
| The really messed up thing is that actual organized bad actors
| aren't really affected by account bans too much: it's just a cost
| of doing business for them. Criminals have systems in place in
| friendly jurisdictions to create a number of new company accounts
| and with a bit of effort just resume whatever fraud they were
| engaged with under a new profile with a fresh new account when
| they get shut down.
|
| Only the stupidest low-level criminals get shut down by the "ban
| first, and ask no questions later" practice.
|
| Compounded by Silicon Valley's refusal to engage with normal
| people, I think the number of false positives and lives and
| businesses destroyed by their refusal to provide human customer
| support is significantly greater than anybody suspects.
| akeck wrote:
| Same here, but for Red Bubble. What's the point of using these
| sites if you can't even start?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I got banned a month ago with the same situation - trying to sell
| niche electronics and servers (neither expensive nor something
| you'd typically associate with any kind of scam). Did you list
| any items as local pickup only? Due to the bulkiness of the items
| I did so and I wonder if there's some scam we're not aware of
| that causes them to auto-ban anything with local collection only?
|
| I since sold the items on a different website but will be making
| a GDPR DSAR to 1) get the data they hold about me (to see if
| there's anything that would explain the ban) and 2) to request a
| manual review of what must've been an automated decision.
| magicjosh wrote:
| I was permabanned from eBay. My only thought was I linked to
| the vendor website, maybe HTML links are nonos or something.
| justinzollars wrote:
| California resident here.
|
| They may even try to charge you - watch out - This happened to
| me. I recommend you call your bank and place a block on Ebay.
| They will not delete my banking information, even though I
| demanded this. The only way I could prevent them from taking my
| money was by placing a bank block on them.
| wildmanx wrote:
| I would really like to hear the other side of this story.
|
| It's not too uncommon that some automated process blocks
| something. And customer service not being too helpful is also
| common. But the customer service being _that_ rude, _twice_ ...
| something is missing here. I my experience, if somebody gets
| blocked off like that, ghosted, hung up like that, something else
| has happened. There are different ways for a customer to express
| their issue and present their complain. Some get rude, demand to
| talk to a supervisor, and it sounds a bit like that 's what
| happened here. That it happened twice is another indication.
|
| It may have been bad from the customer service's side. Not
| impossible. But there is a smell to this story that makes me
| wonder what _actually_ happened.
| SalmoShalazar wrote:
| Yeah there are a few missing details I'd like filled in before
| I take any sides here. What kinds of electronics was the OP
| trying to sell? What did they say to the customer service
| agents to prompt them to immediately hang up on them?
| kleiba wrote:
| If you live in Europe, you can request eBay to delete all your
| personal information under the GDPR.
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| and also request all info they have on you including the reason
| for termination. however getting this executed is another
| matter, but it would be a nice court case to win.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Happened to me twice on Amazon. Amazon also seems to match
| addresses and phone numbers to detect connected accounts.
| Vladimof wrote:
| I think Reddit uses IP addresses and fingerprinting to detect
| connected accounts.. wouldn't suprise me if Amazon did the
| same...
| digyan wrote:
| tomatowurst wrote:
| > I signed up for an eBay account.
|
| > my account was suspended.
|
| > Don't use eBay.
|
| Been on ebay since 2001 and never had issues.
|
| There's a variety of reasons why OP was banned, email, risk
| management, using vpn, shared ISP where people have been doing
| frauds from, other reasons.
|
| This post really shouldn't be grounds to tell people not to use
| ebay, many people do successfully and have for decades.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| I have been in eBay since 2005 and for some reason in 2021 they
| decided to put my account in "probation" mode and limit my
| amount of monthly sales to 150eur. They could as well have
| banned me altogether.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Your "I've never had problems" is just another anecdotal story
| like the op's. Why is your opinion that eBay is okay more
| acceptable to strangers than the op's opinion not to use it?
| magicjosh wrote:
| As a long time user, it sounds like you would be greatly
| impacted by such a ban. Watch out! If you at all depend on eBay
| for your livelyhood, have a backup plan or parallel path. eBay
| is shit.
| tomatowurst wrote:
| I won't but whatever you were doing got you banned. I don't
| rely on ebay for sales, its really good for buying
| collectibles or selling them.
| vmception wrote:
| the reason we don't blame the victim is because it requires
| someone else to do a harmful action that wasn't necessary.
|
| ebay's action and implementation is not necessary. this is
| a conversation about that.
| tomatowurst wrote:
| we dont know who the victim here is.
|
| strange seeing all these old inactive accounts suddenly
| posting in this thread.
|
| its like somebody actually took the time to create
| multiple accounts, to astroturf a given thread in the
| future. pretty pathetic use of time if you ask me.
| vmception wrote:
| okay. the reason we don't _blame the affected person_ is
| because..
| magicjosh wrote:
| you can also take the opposite meaning from this signal.
| I haven't posted in 75 days, but a thread about ebay
| screwing people over was enough to get me to login.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > There's a variety of reasons why OP was banned, email, risk
| management, using vpn, shared ISP where people have been doing
| frauds from, other reasons.
|
| And ebay shared none of them. I don't understand the need to
| jump in to make excuses for them when you have no more
| information than the rest of us do. Why make up reasons out of
| whole cloth?
| robbiep wrote:
| They've actually gone mad.
|
| I've got a bunch of extra hardware I've been trying to offload.
| 15 year old account and I log in to try and sell something and I
| can only sell 1 thing a month. If I had I'd created a new account
| I could sell 10, my past selling history is irrelevant.
|
| Oh, and the 'user' who has won/bought my old iPhone X has now
| twice been someone with no sale history who hasn't paid. Are they
| waiting for me to maybe ship it to them by accident? Insane
| prawn wrote:
| Using a VPN? An upstanding friend used a VPN to access Instagram
| and had his account confiscated. Took six months to convince them
| to unlock it.
| novaleaf wrote:
| Just yesterday I bought stuff on ebay using a VPN (PIA). They
| locked my account and made me do a password reset.
|
| I suppose good thing I was just buying, not selling anything.
| prawn wrote:
| I bet it's a massive factor in fraud detection and they
| figure it might be worth the collateral damage. Once upon a
| time, the subset of people using a VPN would've been the
| subset recommending sites to other users (e.g., Google's rise
| over Altavista), but I bet that's less the case now.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Reading all these comments and realizing it's far from an
| isolated incident (plus the account suspension stories from other
| companies), I wonder, is there going to be a time where these
| shitty platforms eventually collapse on themselves once they end
| up banning the majority of their userbase?
| userbinator wrote:
| I think they have far too many non-banned users feeding them
| $$$ to care; and if their false positive rates go up, they'll
| be the ones to notice and adjust. Doesn't help the significant
| (in absolute, not relative terms) number of false positives
| though.
| bvinc wrote:
| This is every company that deals with fraud of some sort. They
| collect evidence. Once evidence is damning enough, they ban,
| without giving any information. If they were to give out their
| evidence, then their evidence collection methods would become
| known and would no longer be effective.
|
| Furthermore, even when they get it right, people who were banned
| correctly come on to the internet to complain.
|
| But sometimes they get it wrong. And the only recourse seems to
| be a public shaming online.
| protomyth wrote:
| I still wish some Congress person would introduce a consumer
| fairness act that required companies to give the specific
| evidence and reason for any service ban if the company has over
| 100,000 users. I don't think the security implications override
| the current level of abuse.
| xwdv wrote:
| I doubt this is the full story.
| Maursault wrote:
| While there is surely more to it, this kind of scenario
| should have been predicted before Internet companies got big.
| You see, the company can lose real money if there actually is
| a legal issue with an account holder and they don't act; they
| can be implicated in crime and be fined and have to spend
| money on attorneys to sort it out. However, it costs the
| company absolutely nothing to find, using automation, all
| complaints against any account holder valid and instaban
| them. It's cold, hard business. Everyone accused is punished
| without any resources spent on investigation to discover the
| truth. The truth here doesn't matter to the company. People
| don't matter to the company. Only money matters.
| yanderekko wrote:
| Yep. OP's only real recourse is to just try again in 6 months
| or a year or whatever and hope that their ML algorithm
| evaluates their data differently.
|
| If Ebay gave a credit report-style summary saying "you're
| banned because you're associated with this IP range" or
| something, then indeed this becomes information that would be
| exploited by fraudsters. If OP is actually innocent then their
| being banned is considered an acceptable risk.... one can only
| hope that in future model training though that this ban would
| be considered a false positive.
| rkk3 wrote:
| >> They collected a ton of my sensitive information (address,
| phone, bank account, etc)
|
| > Yep. OP's only real recourse is to just try again in 6
| months or a year or whatever and hope that their ML algorithm
| evaluates their data differently.
|
| And what change their identity? They already have their PII
| and banned them for life.
| Thaxll wrote:
| What about taking them to court?
| Gigachad wrote:
| For what? They have the right to refuse service.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| There is another recourse, which is legislation. Contact your
| representatives and let them know that the integrity of eBay's
| evidence collection methods should be eBay's problem to deal
| with, and not their customers'.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| > If they were to give out their evidence, then their evidence
| collection methods would become known and would no longer be
| effective.
|
| I would like to dispute this. Of course, there is a cat-and-
| mouse game between popular online services and fraudsters, but
| the argument "if we show you the methods we use to spot them,
| they won't become effective" is a flawed argument. Sure, it
| helps a little, but after some time many of these just become
| public knowledge anyway.
|
| I know if I like too many photos on Instagram, they will block
| me temporarily, and if I repeat it within certain period, they
| can ban me for a few days and so on. Having these thresholds
| and other rules spelled out would be helpful to users. They
| would know what to avoid, and if they misbehave, they can be
| rightfully punished. Giving blows out of the thin air is simply
| unfair.
| notahacker wrote:
| > I know if I like too many photos on Instagram, they will
| block me temporarily, and if I repeat it within certain
| period, they can ban me for a few days and so on. Having
| these thresholds and other rules spelled out would be helpful
| to users
|
| It would be far more helpful to spammers, who could then set
| all their bots to send threshold - 1 likes and invitations
| than the average user who rarely ever considers liking enough
| stuff to trigger it (and is able to take the hint and just
| not like stuff as much if they do get a warning). Plus in
| practice it's probably not just a simple threshold, but a
| function weighted by timing and topics and relatedness of
| accounts and which is completely unintelligible to the
| average person (but potentially informative to more advanced
| spambot developers).
| ipaddr wrote:
| Do you not think these limits are being tested and shared
| already? I ran into a temporary ig ban when getting rid of
| a number of people I followed. When I searched for answers
| the limits were everywhere being discussed.
|
| Before bug bounty programs this was the reason given for
| not disclosing security issues. All it did was keep the
| issues underground not fixed and allowed security bugs to
| exist forever.
| netr0ute wrote:
| Then make the thresholds low enough so that spam bots are
| totally ineffective by staying below the threshold.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| If you lower the threshold far enough you'll also hit
| some of the most active users.
| Aeolun wrote:
| True, but they'll know exactly what's up.
| madrox wrote:
| Imagine if our justice system worked like this, where you could
| get convicted without ever seeing the evidence against you
| because it would reveal the methods the police used.
|
| I realize it's not entirely the same thing, but it's also not
| entirely different.
| vitro wrote:
| Read Kafka's The Trial [1], nice description of how it feels
| to be a person living in such system.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I wasn't arrested, repeatedly seduced by a barrage of women
| with ulterior motives, or killed by the government, so my
| story would make a terrible novel, but this is how I felt
| dealing with the government as the executor of a family
| member's estate.
|
| After I grieved for some time and taken sentimental items,
| her house had fallen into disrepair, so I sold it at a loss
| to an investor, and I was mostly ready to start moving on
| with my life. Somehow, the death certificate provided to me
| by the government about a year prior to this did not
| indicate that the government was aware of her death, and I
| needed send them back a copy of that very certificate in
| order to make the government officially aware of what
| happened.
|
| Then I was told that I would need to wait six months for
| the estate process to end. During that time, I was given
| random tasks to do at no set interval, usually with
| deadlines of only a couple days. Then literally one day
| before the six month time period was over, I was told that
| the government would be taking the money in the estate due
| to unpaid medical bills from some years before her death
| (the same trips to the hospital that had failed to diagnose
| her illness in the first place). After getting more lawyers
| to investigate whether this was possible and correct (it
| was, private creditors' time limit starts at the time of
| death, but government's time limit starts whenever the
| aforementioned paperwork is filed (also this only took me a
| day or so to figure out, because I do not enjoy long drawn
| out bureaucratic processes unlike the state government I
| was interacting with)), I resigned to give up and give them
| the money.
|
| However, that was not an option either. It took ANOTHER six
| months of random tasks to actually give them the money. I
| honestly don't remember what most of the tasks were,
| because none of it made any sense, but the final task
| really summed up the whole process. I received a call on a
| Thursday afternoon: I had to mail a physical check to my
| lawyer to then hand-deliver to a department within seven
| days, but that department was only open on Mondays 10AM to
| noon.
|
| All for the terrible crime of having a family member die
| without having memorized estate law ahead of time. I do
| consider what they did some unnecessary abstract form of
| violence/coercion, because otherwise I obviously would not
| have voluntarily signed up to do any of that shit. At least
| if they had been honest enough to tell me at the start they
| were planning to just take everything, I would've just
| declined to be the executor and let the government do what
| it wanted with the property. They could have had that money
| (probably more money, since I wouldn't have paid a third of
| it to an estate lawyer and the house would've been in
| better condition) close to two years earlier and left me
| alone at the same time.
| withinboredom wrote:
| My Uncle-in-law is literally going through this process
| right now. There's literally nothing left for the family
| despite so much being left to it. It's mind-blowing how
| land that has been passed down for generations just goes
| "poof." Meanwhile, had the family member known they were
| going to pass away, they could have just sold the land
| for a token amount and it wouldn't have been part of the
| estate.
| version_five wrote:
| Just a reminder that Kafka's book like The Trial and The
| Castle are based on his experience working within the
| Hapsburg Empire bureaucracy. He wasn't imagining some
| nightmare world so much as documenting it.
| koolba wrote:
| > Imagine if our justice system worked like this, where you
| could get convicted without ever seeing the evidence against
| you because it would reveal the methods the police used.
|
| That exists and it's just as prone to abuse as you think: htt
| ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| Also the US No Fly List.
| Tao332 wrote:
| Also the Disposition Matrix
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix
| xvector wrote:
| Easy for us to armchair complain about these things when
| we aren't in charge of protecting the country.
| [deleted]
| teawrecks wrote:
| We are in charge of protecting our country. We choose who
| does it, and should hold those who don't do it
| appropriately accountable.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Even the people who are directly in charge of protecting
| the country have raised concerns about this.
| MichaelBurge wrote:
| That's actually how it works though. See "Parallel
| Construction".
|
| Except instead of saying "Access Denied" which immediately
| makes you suspicious and comment on the internet, they
| construct an alternative evidence chain so you waste your
| effort defending against the wrong thing, and the true
| techniques never come into question.
| epistasis wrote:
| This is the difference between public and private entities.
|
| However when a monopoly starts to take over, what is a
| private entity starts to have governmental powers.
|
| In the US, there has been a century long politics effort to
| reduce anti-monopoly protections, to the point that the
| standard is now "are consumers being actively harmed in
| pricing" and what you experience would likely never be
| considered something that could now result in anti-monopoly
| action.
|
| And without those anti-monopoly protections, eBay gets to
| collect economic rents--pure economic waste that profits eBay
| and hurts everyone else.
|
| We need a return to Georgism to help fight some really bad
| politics that have developed over the past century.
| mulmen wrote:
| Well you have a choice in e-commerce marketplaces. You don't
| have a choice in justice systems.
|
| eBay does not have a monopoly on violence.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Well yes and no. In the UK ebay has a monopoly. There are
| no other marketplaces that offer the same services and the
| same reach. That is why it should be regulated.
| rzwitserloot wrote:
| In the justice system of most western countries, the general
| trend is: "Rather 10 criminals who go free, than one innocent
| person behind bars".
|
| To live up to that statement, society pays. Through the nose
| - letting criminals walk free is annoying, we do pay the cost
| of trying to find them, and we pay a large cost gathering
| evidence to make it stick in court even when e.g. the cops
| are 80% sure. Courts are very expensive; judges have a
| salary. As a society we pay this, because, well, take the
| frustration of OP and now imagine the penalty is not 'banned
| from ebay', it's 'in jail for life' or even just 'most
| employers will no longer employ you because criminal record'.
|
| eBay could choose to pay these costs. It will mean:
|
| * Paying for a tribunal of sorts, paying to have them set up
| procedures and checking that they live up to them.
|
| * Accepting that most fraudsters will just go 'free'.
|
| * Accepting that fraudsters who do get 'caught', still spend
| a lot of time 'free' whilst the laborious process runs its
| course.
|
| * To manage fraudsters, rules are created and publicised
| which interfere with legitimate business to some extent;
| everybody on the platform will have to deal with the fact
| they can no longer do this. (Laws that oversimplify - in
| society parlance: Walking through a red light even when there
| are clearly no cars at all is still illegal; that anybody can
| clearly see it was safe to do this doesn't change either the
| fact that you could be ticketed for this offense, or that
| police should just arbitrarily let this go).
|
| In this case, 'society' becomes 'ebay users'. Do ebay users
| want to carry the burden of this cost? In any case, ebay
| users carry the burden of paying for the salaries of eBay's
| board which may well be excessive.
|
| Why isn't there an ebay alternative? One that is more
| expensive for buyers and sellers but has all this? In large
| part, network effect makes it infeasible to have many ebay-
| esques out there. None of them would be any good at that
| point, and/or you get services that make it easy to post to
| all of them.
| kingcharles wrote:
| > In the justice system of most western countries, the
| general trend is: "Rather 10 criminals who go free, than
| one innocent person behind bars".
|
| As someone with almost a decade of experience in the
| criminal justice system in the USA, it is pretty much the
| exact opposite. Of the dozens of prosecutors I know, I
| can't think of a single one that would care if someone is
| innocent of the crime for which they are charged.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > * Accepting that most fraudsters will just go 'free'.
|
| But already go free, there is staggering ammount of fraud,
| counterfeit, stolen and illegal goods on Ebay.
|
| Their system is more like "10,000 criminals who go free, 15
| random people get banned and the person who wrote the
| algorythm get a raise and no-one measures the amount of
| crime or gives a shit"
| withinboredom wrote:
| My wife got banned from some service a year or so ago. I
| asked her if she complained, she said no. I thought to
| myself, "well, I bet those spam-stats are going to look
| great this quarter."
| nitwit005 wrote:
| It seems to be fairly rare for there to be a way to
| complain. They often make you log in to file a support
| ticket, but you can't log in anymore.
|
| I suspect most of these companies have no real idea what
| their false positive rate is.
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| > Accepting that most fraudsters will just go 'free'.
|
| I think part of the problem is that even if eBay is willing
| to spend a lot more money on this process, everyday buyers
| will blame them whenever something goes wrong and just stop
| using it altogether. Basically, they want to be seen as an
| alternative to Amazon and don't want buyers to ever think
| about risk. The sophisticated users are already aware of it
| and are very skeptical, but the newer users who never read
| or leave reviews make them money too.
| ghaff wrote:
| There are two sides to every fraud. So if 75% of
| suspected/accused fraudsters go free, on the other side
| is a ton of buyers/sellers who got scammed. And to top it
| off the word gets around that you can scam on eBay and
| almost certainly get off with it.
|
| eBay can try to make people whole who claim to be
| defrauded. But in addition to being expensive that
| creates its own perverse incentives.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I have several hundred EBay transactions over the last 15
| years, probably 99 buys for every sale.
|
| In the past few years, EBay has gotten very good at being
| pro-buyer (which is good for me). I can think of 2
| transactions in the last 3 years that were "enough not as
| described" for me to bother to complain. In both
| instances, the sellers immediately offered something
| reasonable and we all moved on with our lives. (I think
| both sellers were clueless as to the defects, being high-
| volume churners of resold tech.)
|
| It might be the case that EBay is more buyer friendly
| than Amazon at this point.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Have you heard of facebook marketplace, esty, shopify? EBay
| doesn't have the monopoly it once did.
|
| People go to court for murder yes but they also go for
| smaller things like a neighbour's tree causing property
| damage. The cost are different.
|
| Companies that force users to give up the ability to sue
| need to provide an alt system.
|
| "Rather 10 criminals who go free, than one innocent person
| behind bars"
|
| This is not how things work outside of tv and talk radio.
| 1/3 of people in jail are innocent. Cops being sure doesn't
| make a fact true. Everyone has different priorities and
| cops are extremely good at jumping to simple answers
| because this is in their collective interest.
| bluGill wrote:
| EBay is still where you turn for random things that few
| people need. Baby toys can sell on Facebook, but parts
| for an obsolete computer are valuable to the right person
| and worthless to everyone else.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > In the justice system of most western countries, the
| general trend is: "Rather 10 criminals who go free, than
| one innocent person behind bars".
|
| > To live up to that statement, society pays. ... As a
| society we pay this, because, well, take the frustration of
| OP and now imagine the penalty is not 'banned from ebay',
| it's 'in jail for life' or even just 'most employers will
| no longer employ you because criminal record'.
|
| Aren't you describing a cost that is _alleviated_ by
| (allegedly) making sure that the innocent aren 't
| imprisoned, or, rather, a cost that would be borne if the
| legal system made sure to imprison those whom "the cops are
| 80% sure" were guilty?
| bambax wrote:
| > _I realize it's not entirely the same thing_
|
| It is absolutely the same thing.
| kingcharles wrote:
| You have no constitutional right in the US to see any of the
| evidence against you before trial.
|
| And where I am in Illinois, until a couple of years ago, if
| you were held in a county jail awaiting trial you were
| prohibited by law from having a copy of any of the evidence
| against you.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Traffic and as speeding tickets almost work the same way
| cjbprime wrote:
| You can contest them in court and demand that evidence is
| shown. That's not almost the same at all.
| notch656a wrote:
| You can but at least in the last state I lived, a cop's
| guesstimation is accepted (they count in their head or
| watch and count the lines or something, or that's the
| theory). In practice if the cop used an uncalibrated
| speed gun or whatever he'll always just say it was his
| guesstimation and precedent holds that the preponderance
| of the evidence shows that the ticket is valid.
|
| So it returns back to the evidence being hidden and
| parallel construction being used to present the court
| case.
| ______-_-______ wrote:
| I honestly think that's still better than most online
| bans. If you find out you were ticketed because a cop had
| a bad day, it's not justice, but at least it's closure.
| Now you know, and you can accept it or fight/appeal if
| you're so inclined.
|
| If you're permabanned because of a google/ebay AI bug,
| you can't even get that far.
| cormacrelf wrote:
| Not sure if this is your intention or even what
| jurisdiction you're talking about, but "a preponderance
| of the evidence" is a fancy way of saying "to a civil
| standard" ie "more likely than not". Seems unlikely for a
| criminal offence, where that's never the standard. It was
| probably a fair bit more complicated than you're making
| out.
| tyrfing wrote:
| > in some states, minor traffic violations aren't
| considered "crimes"--they're "civil" offenses. So, in
| these states, the government might be held to a lesser
| standard of proof for traffic cases. For example, in New
| York, the standard of proof for traffic violations is
| "clear and convincing evidence." And in Oregon, the state
| needs to prove traffic offenses only by a "preponderance
| of the evidence."
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| De jure it is more complicated, de facto, not so much.
| notch656a wrote:
| Those are the literal words spoken by the judge the last
| time I challenged a speeding case. I was also forced to
| testify against myself and told clearly and specifically
| by the judge I had no fifth amendment right to remain
| silent.
|
| [admittedly that challenge happened in a different state
| than the guesstimation state. I don't even bother to
| challenge in the guesstimation state because you're
| basically fucked no matter what.]
|
| The judge's explanation to me was that any offense
| without possible jail time are held to preponderance of
| the evidence and constitutional rights such as 5th
| amendment are revoked.
|
| I've also been called to show up in a 'Mayors court' for
| speeding where the mayor who is the cousin of the cop
| oversees your case. Good luck with that; the ACLU has
| actually done a pretty extensive documentation on Mayor's
| courts and the corruption involved there.
| torstenvl wrote:
| The 5th amendment (or rather the 14th in this case)
| requires "due process" before taking your life, liberty,
| or property.
|
| As is probably intuitive, the process that is "due" for
| taking property, which is less than is "due" for taking
| liberty, which is still somewhat less than is "due" for
| taking life. (This latter hasn't always been the case,
| but read Brennan's concurrence in Furman v. Georgia and
| progeny cases establishing the death-is-different axiom
| of American criminal jurisprudence.)
|
| A property interest that doesn't implicate any liberty
| interest may be taken with a bare minimum of due process,
| often just notice and an opportunity to be heard. If a
| hearing is granted, the standard is a preponderance (not
| beyond a reasonable doubt).
|
| I assume the penalty for your speeding ticket was a fine
| only, yes?
| ncmncm wrote:
| Due process utterly failed to save the lives of the
| unconvicted and unindicted American citizens Anwar al-
| Awlaki, his 16-year-old son, (both blown up by remote
| control) or his 8-year-old daughter (shot in the neck),
| all three murdered under constitutionally indefensible
| Presidential order. None of the principals or co-
| conspirators has yet been prosecuted.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| dandanua wrote:
| > If they were to give out their evidence, then their evidence
| collection methods would become known and would no longer be
| effective
|
| Companies can give the exact reason for a ban at least, without
| disclosing the methods of deduction. There is absolutely no
| reason to hide this information.
|
| Such a behavior of companies is a big "f*ck you" to democracy
| and justice, not to criminals. It's exactly how totalitarianism
| looks like.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > It's exactly how totalitarianism looks like..
|
| Ofcourse it does, a corporation is a totalitarian
| organisation by design - I don't understand why anyone is
| surprised to learn this. Any disobedience or herecy and you
| are removed with prejudice.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| The exact reason is probably that their ML model told them
| to. They probably have no ability to give a more satisfying
| answer.
| dandanua wrote:
| I don't think their model just says them "fraud/no fraud".
| There are different types of fraud, which should be written
| in their TOS.
| zippergz wrote:
| No, this is not how these systems work. You're correct
| that they don't say "fraud/no fraud" but they generate a
| score (like a credit score) based on a massive number of
| inputs, and there are thresholds over which action
| (account ban, etc.) is taken. It does not in any way map
| to "types of fraud" and it does not map to the TOS. It's
| about identifying activity or accounts that look
| sufficiently similar to previous bad actors.
| 0x_rs wrote:
| Welcome to the automated account suspension age of the internet,
| where companies shoot first and don't care later, as the amount
| of false positives is not worth putting any meagerly (if there's
| any already) real, physical support to resolve. This can apply to
| smaller companies too, for other but equally pricey reasons. The
| amount of fraudulent activity attempts online may warrant those
| aggressive measures from their business perspective (that are
| also not limited to passive data collection, but taking active
| steps such as scanning targets' ports [0]). Unfortunately, if you
| live in certain areas or are forced to use mobile networks, with
| IPs constantly refreshing multiple times a day, major services
| can be almost unusable, and the user may not even realize the
| reason why. Some--for reasons I'm not knowledgeable about--do it
| better than others, but it may simply be about the resources put
| into it and the amount of risk a miss could amount to.
|
| 0. https://blog.nem.ec/2020/05/24/ebay-port-scanning/
| rdfi wrote:
| I wonder if you can, under GDPR, request that all your data is
| deleted and then create a new account. Not allowing you to
| create a new account could be argued as a violation of GDPR as
| it would mean that they kept personally identifiable data about
| you.
| linker3000 wrote:
| Also, under the GDPR, you may have the right for any solely-
| automated decision making about you to then involve a human:
|
| https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-
| protectio...
|
| Mind you, there's nothing to stop eBay from having someone
| now look at your data and go 'nope'.
| chias wrote:
| Generally, no.
|
| GDPR specifically carves out keeping data for "legitimate
| business needs" including fraud prevention and so on.
| Whatever data Ebay (thinks it) has about this person that
| they are using to enforce the ban would be data that they
| would argue falls under this clause.
| Aeolun wrote:
| This is circular. If there was no reason to ban him then
| keeping the data for fraud prevention purposes obviously
| doesn't hold any water.
| rcxdude wrote:
| keeping information for the purposes of enforcing rules and
| bans is explicitly allowed in GDPR and you are not forced to
| delete it. (similarly, you can't ask a company to delete all
| the stuff you've bought and sold them from their accounts)
| londons_explore wrote:
| However many companies are sufficiently scared of the GDPR
| and potentially keeping data they shouldn't accidentally
| that they will just delete everything about you. You can
| totally use that to get the 'new customer discount' again
| at Uber for example...
| andylynch wrote:
| Keeping PII for fraud detection is not barred by GDPR.
|
| In this context the more relevant aspect of GDPR, which I
| think receives too little attention and more so enforcement,
| is article 22 (Automated individual decision-making,
| including profiling)
| teraflop wrote:
| Contrary to popular understanding, the GDPR does not allow
| you to force a company to delete all data about you.
|
| In effect, it lets you _revoke_ your consent for the company
| to store and process your data. But it also provides for
| cases where your data can be processed without your consent.
| It 's not an unlimited carte blanche, but fraud prevention is
| explicitly given as an example of a legitimate purpose.
| cj wrote:
| This is correct.
|
| Businesses are allowed to retain information necessary to
| operate. Which would include things like names, email
| addresses, IP addresses, etc of people who are banned (to
| prevent them from returning).
|
| If GDPR required a company to delete _everything_ , it
| would be impractical. (E.g. imagine you request a company
| delete your info, and then you immediately sue them for
| something that happened while using their
| product/service... the company wouldn't be able to defend
| themselves unless they retained a record/logs of your
| usage.
|
| You can submit a deletion request, but in most cases much
| of your data won't actually be deleted.
| varsketiz wrote:
| > Which would include things like names, email addresses,
| IP addresses, etc of people who are banned (to prevent
| them from returning).
|
| I'm not sure about that. The company might reason it
| needs this data to operate, but you should be able to
| contest that with a data protection authority.
|
| The data that you can not request to delete is for
| example money transaction data, which the company has to
| retain for 10 years or so due to other laws.
| cj wrote:
| Curious - has anyone here submitted a complaint to a data
| authority? I wonder what that process is like.
| Archelaos wrote:
| Under GDPR, a company may retain personal data if it has a
| legitimate interest in doing so. To what extent this applies
| here, I do not know.
|
| You might have a chance to successfully challenge the
| termination by legal means, if you actually did not violate
| Ebay's terms and conditions.
| ryan-c wrote:
| "For fraud prevention purposes" is a legitimate interest,
| so the probably won't work.
| [deleted]
| WaxProlix wrote:
| This is what I was going to say. As an American, I have no
| recourse in these situations. Europeans are fortunate to have
| governing bodies with at least some teeth. Not sure how that
| applies to UK citizens post-Brexit, though.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > As an American
|
| A bit over 10% (and probably somewhat higher than 10% on
| HN) of Americans do have something like GDPR. California
| Consumer Privacy Act. I'm not including Colorado, Virginia,
| or Utah because I'm not sure how equivalent their laws are.
| conradfr wrote:
| They have the UK-GDPR now.
|
| https://www.cookiebot.com/en/uk-gdpr/
| dylan604 wrote:
| If I were trying to be sneaky, could you create a series of
| hashes of the name/email/address/bank type of info to stored
| on GDPR deletion request that could then be checked against
| any new account creation? Since the only data stored after
| deletion would be a hash with no PII remaining, is this a
| viable workaround?
| liaukovv wrote:
| If you can use hash to identify someone then its pii by
| definition
| anonymousiam wrote:
| I do not agree. The identity can be extended with some
| GUID and then hashed. The GUID and hash can be kept, but
| the identity discarded. Then the original identity is
| lost, but if encountered again, it will be known that it
| was previously seen.
| mindri0t wrote:
| >but if encountered again, it will be known that it was
| previously seen
|
| But when you see it again you have personally identified
| the individual have you not? Doesn't that by definition
| mean it is identifiable if you are able to determine the
| identity later?
|
| This is something that advertisers/supermarket points
| schemes etc used to do when they didn't have consent to
| share personal data, hash it and align it with what they
| already had so effectively they shared the subsets of
| interest anyway. I remember at university when some guys
| from yahoo sponsored a hack event, they literally gave a
| guest lecture boasting about doing this with Sainsbury's
| to squeeze through a legal loophole back in 2013.
| dylan604 wrote:
| That's the fun of thought experiments, the rabbit hole
| just keeps going.
|
| If your original delete request was followed so that
| everything they knew about you was deleted, they would
| not be able to relink everything that GUID linked to. It
| should be gone now. However, if that hashed value lives
| in a BANNED_ACCOUNTS table, then all they have to do is
| create the hash, check the table, disallow new account.
| You can even do it in good faith by not storing any of
| the new info rather than storing it and forcing a new
| delete request.
| bentcorner wrote:
| It's not clear to me how from a privacy perspective
| that's different from the hash of an id.
| maxpro wrote:
| Not really, as GDPR is not only about screwing up big
| companies. Certain kind of data must be saved by companies
| (like financial transactions). You can request the deletion,
| but they are still allowed to save some of the data.
| tchvil wrote:
| Thank you for the hint. Will do that.
|
| I was banned the same way as the OP, few months ago.
| They(humans)collected my Id, bank details, personal address,
| original invoice of the items I was selling, some calls, to
| finally ban my 15+ year user.
| kurupt213 wrote:
| Is this a way around Reddit bans?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Keeping that data to maintain a ban seems self-evidently in
| the space of "needed for the health and operation of the
| service."
|
| At the very least, I'm sure eBay lawyers would be happy to
| argue the point.
| holoduke wrote:
| The should make a movie in which a person gets expelled from
| society because of a bug. In his long quest for his
| reinstatement, he needs to endure the great corrupted
| algorithms trying to erase him for good.
| radar1310 wrote:
| wand3r wrote:
| This is basically a digital version of Kafka's The Trial, and
| is just as aburdist because it kind of really happens
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I give you "Brazil" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/)
|
| edit: typo corrected, thanks.
| als0 wrote:
| "Brazil"
| MrPatan wrote:
| Love it. The "studio ending" makes it even more Orwellian,
| to the point I wonder if they did that on purpose. (Can
| that much competence be true?)
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Wonderful movie, but good god is it long and hard to watch
| at times
| a-dub wrote:
| one of my all-time favorites! ...aaand this is my receipt,
| for your receipt.
| nopenoperope wrote:
| Brazil is pretty much that movie if you haven't seen it
| already.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
| ineedasername wrote:
| Kafka explored this in great depth, albeit in analog form.
|
| I don't think I fully appreciate the assignments to read
| Kafka in college until these algorithmic bans, ousting from
| app stores, automated support, etc came along. Before that I
| figured the human element could, in most cases even if it
| required extreme difficulty, sort things out eventually. Then
| came these heuristic algorithms that have practically become
| the platonic ideal if Kafka-esque systems.
|
| Edit: While Amazon is _very_ far from perfect and has dropped
| several notches in customer service, I will say that they are
| still very good compared to others. I can still get ahold of
| a real person that has some leeway for professional judgement
| when addressing a problem.
| netik wrote:
| I agree with you fully - it was hard to understand Kafka
| (as a student) until presented with half a life of examples
| from society.
| sharkweek wrote:
| This is why I named my son Droptable Stuxnet.exe Null
| zmix wrote:
| And from here we go on to https://xkcd.com/327/
| colpabar wrote:
| Not exactly what you describe, but I saw this in theaters and
| thought it did a great job of showing the horrors that these
| humanless systems can create.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnbDNv3uAl0
| grishka wrote:
| > Unfortunately, if you live in certain areas or are forced to
| use mobile networks, with IPs constantly refreshing multiple
| times a day, major services can be almost unusable
|
| Here's a handy list of valid uses for IP addresses:
|
| 1. Packet routing.
| ineedasername wrote:
| How am I to remember all that? I need a mnemonic.
| blep_ wrote:
| Just remember the handy acronym "PACKET ROUTING"!
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I'm okay with very short lived IP bans to fight DDoS attacks.
| But yeah, that's about it.
| nhadgtyuh wrote:
| noobermin wrote:
| Stuff like this is an example of the failure of the market,
| because it's market wide and it's not like a service that
| actually puts labor into handling cases will find an advantage
| in the market and thus there is no incentive for it. This is a
| place where regulation actually makes sense.
| catsarebetter wrote:
| This is why niche products and small businesses can succeed
| [deleted]
| nitwit005 wrote:
| The value of an auction site relates to the number of users
| it has, so it's difficult for a competitor to appear and
| dislodge it.
| orware wrote:
| Quick question...did your account have a history and past
| positive reviews from any purchases you had made in the past?
|
| I have a long-standing account and rarely buy on eBay nowadays
| (I'm trying to recall if I've ever sold anything...if I have it
| was maybe only one item but I don't even recall if it sold or
| not).
|
| Recently, I was looking into buying a used gaming PC via eBay to
| save a few bucks and I ended up completing a "Buy it now"
| purchase quickly without looking more into the seller (or their
| location). The location wasn't a big deal (Paris, France) but
| that mainly meant the shipping would take longer. What ended up
| being more concerning was the 0 rating for the seller, which
| immediately make think "oh crap". I reached out to the seller
| just to see if I could get a response with no quick reply, but I
| sent one short follow up the next day when I didn't receive a
| response and shared my concern and waited another day before
| reaching out to eBay about the concern I had about the seller
| (especially because by this point the original listing was gone
| and then it even seemed like the seller's account too). I used
| the live chat option and the person there was very helpful and
| got the process started and mentioned to reach back on Friday
| (about 3 days later), but later that same day my refund was
| issued and the case closed which I was grateful for.
|
| But it did make me wonder of what might be an apparent difficulty
| for newer accounts to sell successfully on the platform? (Kind of
| like stories I've heard about liquor licenses being grandfathered
| in for certain locations in cities, whereas it may be more work
| for a new location to apply for one...maybe newer sellers can
| easily be flagged? The inability to dispute the situation when
| you are obviously willing/able to communicate with the eBay staff
| however is the sad part in your story since legitimate
| individuals should always have recourse to be heard in these
| large tech platforms).
| dehrmann wrote:
| > I have some extra electronics around my house that I'd like to
| sell so I signed up for an eBay account. In one hour I posted 6
| listings totaling less than 500GBP
|
| Depending on the price of the items and how many, this is exactly
| what it looks like when someone opens an account to sell stolen
| electronics.
| cpncrunch wrote:
| Yes, I was banned for something similar. I signed up to ebay
| and put a US$800 bid on an item, and got banned shortly
| afterwards. Weird. But I did get them to reinstate my account
| by using the online chat. When I sent an email request they
| said the ban was permanent and they couldn't do anything, but
| the online chat support person put me through to a "specialized
| team", who then reverted the ban.
|
| I think the issue is just that their fraud detection is a bit
| ridiculous. If you want to buy used avionics, pretty much the
| only place you can do that is ebay, and everything is $500-1000
| or thereabouts. I had never used ebay in the past 20 years, but
| if I want to fix my plane I'm kinda forced into it.
| joshcryer wrote:
| I sold my RX 580 for $400 (which I got for $120) during peak
| hysteria. eBay locked my account. I went through the process of
| explaining to support that I was selling it because gfx card
| prices were so high.
| mdoms wrote:
| Coincidentally it's exact what it looks like when someone opens
| an account to sell non-stolen electronics.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| If they suspect stolen items they can suspend the account and
| require proof of purchase or extra ID verification (to make it
| as inconvenient and/or risky for a criminal) instead of just
| banning it forever with no explanation.
| tomatowurst wrote:
| Probably not with the scale of frauds they receive. The
| fastest method is to auto-ban and analyze. Ebay did the right
| thing here, unfortunately, its popular amongst carders.
| layer8 wrote:
| The latter is probably much more cost-effective.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Happened to me too. No way to appeal - they simply aren't
| interested. In their eyes if you've been banned it is absolutely
| correct and unappealable. Can't even get through to a human.
|
| Oh well, their loss. Mine too.
| tsak wrote:
| I had a very similar experience and pretty much gave up on eBay
| (after 23 years of being a happy customer).
|
| https://tsak.dev/posts/the-decision-is-final-and-we-cannot-r...
|
| They still owe me over PS100 but it's probably useless to attempt
| to collect.
|
| The best bit was that I was asked to log into my other account
| but was unable to connect to customer support because it was
| suspended forever.
|
| The only sad thing is that eBay is that perfect place for selling
| random things that are too valuable for Facebook marketplace.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > They still owe me over PS100 but it's probably useless to
| attempt to collect.
|
| If you have the time, please take the matter to small claims
| court out of principle (in fact, you can tack on reasonable
| fees for your time on top of the claimed amount).
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| Ebay has reached that size where it doesnt really matter what
| they do, you'll see this in the largest of entities unless they
| seriously fcuk up because of factors like market dominance,
| saturation, the need to profit take and finite number of users.
| Hedge funds do this when they buy brands to add to their
| portfolia, they will streamline, cost cut, perhaps run the brand
| down to the bare bones whilst they formulate the best
| "improvement" leapfrog move in their market to perform in a few
| years time.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Ebay is under pretty heavy competition from Facebook
| marketplace, Aliexpress, Amazon, and various smaller buy/sell
| site. The average user has no problem with the site. It's only
| edge cases like this.
| dn3500 wrote:
| I was permanently banned from Uber even faster than that. It was
| within ten minutes of signing up, before I used it at all. But
| after they got my credit card number and whatever other personal
| information is needed to sign up. No explanation, no recourse.
| TekMol wrote:
| Can cryptography change the state of affairs in this regard?
|
| The whole problem is reputation management here. From eBay's
| perspective, they did not have strong enough signals that you are
| an honest person.
|
| With cryptography, you could sign something like "It's me, Joe So
| And So - signed by the owner of joesoandso.eth". "Oh and here are
| cryptographically signed endorsements of 3 of my friends who are
| long term users of eBay". So that eBay has strong evidence you
| are a reputable person. In an automatable fashion.
| magicjosh wrote:
| "Proof of Humanity" is an interesting blockchain based project
| that aims to solve some of this. Doesn't prove you're not a
| scammer though.
| thallium205 wrote:
| No.
| ghaff wrote:
| There are digital identity systems but you (or at least I)
| would want a trusted authority--like a government--in the
| process somehow. Some have a lot of hope for these systems but
| uptake has been fairly limited.
| ______-_-______ wrote:
| I got banned from eBay as well. I bought a part for my dishwasher
| and received a counterfeit part. I collected evidence, posted the
| photos, and requested a return. Next thing you know my account is
| banned. I think the seller reported me in retaliation.
|
| I have no idea where to go next time I need something. AliExpress
| would probably be even worse when it comes to counterfeits.
| magicjosh wrote:
| I've also been permabanned from eBay. Buyer for 10+ years,
| occasional seller. Went to sell something alongside lots of
| listings for the same thing. Permabanned my account and my
| parent's accounts as I had logged in from their house
| previously. No recourse. "Banned without appeal" they called
| it. "Because of the nature of the ban we cannot tell you
| anything about it". Many frustrating calls.
|
| Years later, my only thesis is it was due to having HTML in my
| product description, I linked to the vendor website. Maybe
| that's against the rules or something.
| _adamb wrote:
| I've received damaged products from AliExpress a handful of
| times and found their resolution team/procedures to be
| fantastic.
|
| You can submit a claim which the seller responds to. If the
| seller doesn't respond fast enough, AE steps in and suggests a
| couple resolutions (usually something like a partial refund
| with no product return, or a full refund if you send the
| product back). You can then negotiate or just accept one of the
| suggestions. Absolutely 0 hassle or talking to a person. You
| click a few buttons and get your money back.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| You wouldn't have been banned from eBay for a single return
| like this. It would have to be a pattern that makes you at
| least appear like an undesirable buyer.
| ComradePhil wrote:
| In my experience, Aliexpress takes claims seriously and is on
| the side of the customer.
| ______-_-______ wrote:
| I actually like Aliexpress, but I wouldn't expect them to
| sell parts for American market appliances. I searched now for
| the old part I needed, and I see "fits <model#>" and
| "compatible with <model#>" but not the genuine part. Call me
| old fashioned but I'll pay an extra $20 for first-party
| components.
| userbinator wrote:
| _Call me old fashioned but I 'll pay an extra $20 for
| first-party components._
|
| ...which are made in China, probably in the same factories
| contracted by the original manufacturer. Aliexpress just
| lets you cut out the middleman.
| markdown wrote:
| You're old fashioned.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| In my experience, I ordered a fake USB3 capture card
| (https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001773724519.html, check
| the 1-star reviews, also debunked by Marcan at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30906127), filled out
| comprehensive documentation of it being fake USB3 and unable
| to capture stable footage at 1080p60, and AliExpress sided
| with the _seller_. I had to file a chargeback to get money
| back for the fraudulent product (and I hear chargebacks can
| be reversed by the seller, not sure if it happened to me).
| dawnerd wrote:
| Chargebacks can only be contested by the merchant if they
| have enough evidence you talk your bank into reversing.
| thewebcount wrote:
| For what it's worth, I have successfully reversed a
| chargeback. I had a customer who ordered a downloadable
| product then did a chargeback. I presented evidence that
| they clicked the unique link for their download and the
| email exchange we had about the product. That seemed
| sufficient to satisfy the card processor.
| Aeolun wrote:
| This can happen. We won a lot of chargebacks as a seller,
| but it's a huge hassle that you really don't want to deal
| with.
| commoner wrote:
| That is absolutely not my experience. During the height of
| the pandemic, many AliExpress sellers failed to deliver
| orders. The tracking numbers that some sellers provided
| showed "delivered" even when the item never arrived. During
| the disputes, AliExpress would request proof that the item
| never arrived, which is not possible to provide. Filing a
| chargeback or PayPal dispute is only an option if you don't
| mind being banned by AliExpress.
|
| eBay and Amazon Marketplace put the burden of proof of
| delivery on the seller instead of the buyer when the shipment
| is not protected with signature confirmation. Many
| AliExpress-style items are also listed on eBay and Amazon at
| similar prices, and I've mostly switched over after my bad
| experiences with AliExpress. AliExpress still has a different
| selection of items, so I haven't stopped using it completely.
| janoc wrote:
| Ehm, nope. Unless your complaint is a very obvious one (i.e.
| seller didn't send anything at all or the item has visibly
| not been delivered from the tracking info), good luck.
|
| E.g. I had obviously fake EEPROM chips delivered, they
| weren't even new (they contained data from the previous
| use!). I have opened a dispute, posted the evidence that the
| chips are relabeled fakes - and promptly got it rejected both
| first time and on appeal. The grunt handling it had
| absolutely no idea what my complaint was about, I have
| received my goods, so what more do I want?
|
| Fortunately it was only a few euros worth so not big deal - I
| have opened the dispute mostly to point out that the seller
| is a fraudster, not to recover my 15EUR or so back. Tough
| luck ...
|
| Over the years I had more luck sorting complaints out on
| AliExpress directly with the sellers because they are afraid
| of losing their ratings and thus a large portion of business
| (people usually sort by price and then by ratings). The
| support staff is hopeless in these cases.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| If this is recent, please file a chargeback with your bank.
| That's the only way to deal with such scum, otherwise they've
| still won - the scammer got their money and eBay got their
| commission.
|
| The only thing that matters is money and this is why these bans
| are a thing - it's cheaper to screw some customers over than to
| have a _competent_ human analyze the situation. Hitting them in
| the wallet is the only place they 'd actually feel it.
| kingcharles wrote:
| This only works if your bank is on your side. I asked for a
| chargeback with my bank at the time (Square) for a fraudulent
| transaction and they terminated my account.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Thankfully, banks in general are in a stricter regulatory
| environment with a government-level watchdog you can
| escalate to, though that might not apply for electronic
| money institutions (or whatever the US equivalent is).
| thallium205 wrote:
| This is what I did in a very similar predicament. They sent
| me to collections after the chargeback and dinged my credit.
| ______-_-______ wrote:
| The interesting thing is I still got refunded, about a week
| after my account was banned. Their backend must be a total
| mess, but it worked out in my favor somehow. If not for that
| I definitely would have done a chargeback.
| realusername wrote:
| The terrible quality of their APIs does suggest it's a mess
| behind as well yeah.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > Their backend must be a total mess
|
| The URL structures on the website are scary and indeed
| suggest the backend is a horrible dumpster fire.
| robryan wrote:
| Not only a mess but they seem to have been halfway
| through modernising things for years.
|
| They built a new API but are probably never going to be
| able to get rid if the old one.
| listenallyall wrote:
| Having trouble fully believing that they wouldn't provide any
| information about the reasons or evidence, but they would tell
| you the length of the banishment. Like, if the phone rep was
| going to simply hang up on you, why would they hesitate just to
| squeeze in the fact that it's a lifetime ban.
|
| I'm not saying this story didn't happen, but like most things,
| when you only hear one side of the story, certain events may not
| be told precisely as they actually happened.
| ronnier wrote:
| Sounds like you got caught up in their spam & abuse systems, if I
| had to guess. Spam/scams are at extremely high levels right now
| across every platform (Oddly somehow, HN keeps things under
| control) -- so companies are getting aggressive with anti abuse
| techniques and capturing innocents by mistake.
| rendall wrote:
| I was amazed that I could make over $10,000 a week in my spare
| time working from home! You can too!
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIcSWuKMwOw
| Pxtl wrote:
| Okay so I knew it was gonna be a rickroll but I'm
| particularly amused at which Rickroll you chose.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| This is probably the funniest comment on HN.
| [deleted]
| rightbyte wrote:
| I got a feeling that so many of the new accounts being made are
| for spam or scams so that some crappy ML algorithm overfits
| towards new account as a marker for scams.
|
| Twitter had the same problem a while ago where I could not make
| an account without it getting instabanned.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Twitter uses instabans as a way to fish for phone numbers -
| you can unban the account instantly by providing one.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| And that's why you use, for this kind of things, your local ad
| methods, or at most something that is based on your country. You
| get banned, you can go physically to their offices or you can,
| depending on your country laws, hire a lawyer and sue.
|
| Also here in Europe, due to GDPR, you can request to get their
| info on you out of their systems after you're done doing business
| with them. If they fail to comply within a certain time-frame (on
| my country is 30 business days), you can sue and easily win.
| sleepdreamy wrote:
| I've been using/selling on Ebay for several years. I've had zero
| issues. Although don't get me started on Paypal being garbage.
|
| Maybe there is more you aren't telling us, or maybe you're being
| honest. Good luck!
| magicjosh wrote:
| This person's experience seems to be validated by others. I
| also have had a similar experience.
|
| Sounds like you have more to lose if you were banned from eBay.
| Watch out!
| Natsu wrote:
| I mean, some random new guy showing up to sell a few hundred
| pounds worth of electronics first thing has got to look exactly
| like the fraudsters look to them. This really sucks for the OP,
| but if Ebay didn't stop accounts fitting that fact pattern,
| they'd get even more fraudsters on their site.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| There could have been a problem with recently created accounts
| posting a few listings right away, posting a listing for an
| item which is similar to that item some fraudsters have been
| selling, or maybe their resident prophet read a sacrificial
| bull's entrails and told to beware of the topic starter.
|
| You never know. And they won't tell you.
|
| And this arbitrariness is the problem precisely.
|
| And no, an argument that telling the reason would help the
| crooks is not going to work, or the place wouldn't be swarming
| with them already.
| Vladimof wrote:
| I'm happy that we don't need to use Paypal to receive money
| from Ebay anymore (I think you can't)... it goes straight to
| your bank account...
| [deleted]
| digisign wrote:
| I think the ad-hoc selling on the internet thing is kinda done,
| outside maybe craigslist-like things. But selling obscure things
| often requires a bigger than local market, where you need the
| full US or similar size to get a sale at a price that is worth
| the trouble. If there is at least $10 or $20 profit I could
| entice a kid to do the legwork. Have a job, so mostly doing it to
| save things from ending up in landfills.
|
| I've had ebay and amazon accounts for 20+ years. Was happy with
| selling used books on amazon for example, but for several years
| can't sell any longer until they can pierce the rest of my
| privacy. Sucks because I had a highly rated history.
|
| Maybe I should log in to ebay again and see if it is still
| possible to sell there, but this message fills me with zero
| confidence.
| hansvm wrote:
| It's absurdly easy to scam people on eBay as both the buyer and
| seller. They probably saw the pattern of a new account selling
| electronics in an amount equal to a month's wages in a lot of
| places and instabanned.
|
| Back when I was selling a lot of electronics there they just had
| restrictions where you couldn't increase your volume much until
| after some successful purchases had gone through. I guess that
| was too easy to game and they've taken a harder stance?
|
| If you do want to sell there eventually (sounds like you don't)
| you just need a new address, new IP, new cookies, new phone, new
| bank, .... As long as you're not actually scamming people and
| don't need true anonymity there are cheap/free services for all
| of those things that usually require some kind of personal
| information (so that if you do use them with nefarious intent the
| courts can find your real identity), and you'd just be violating
| eBay's terms and conditions. As you've seen though, adhering to
| their terms doesn't give any better personal outcomes, so I dunno
| that I'd give a flip about breaking them (not legal advice,
| please don't sue).
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| I've only sold three things and two of them the first buyer
| tried an obvious scam (asking for email to send fake PayPal
| payment notification, telling me they "couldn't get their card
| to work on the eBay site").
|
| The first time eBay flagged it automatically and reversed the
| sale, the second I cancelled as buyer request since they told
| me they couldn't pay.
|
| The annoying thing is I had to manually restart the listing and
| ask eBay to override the selling cap so I could do so. It's
| really annoying because they tie up the listing while waiting
| to see if you are that gullible or not.
| thewebcount wrote:
| Yeah, I hit something weird like this the one time I tried to
| sell something on eBay, too. A buyer bid on it, won the
| auction, then after-the-fact tried to back out. I'm not sure
| what the scam was, but I said no, and they paid and took the
| item. But it totally soured me on selling anything on eBay
| ever again. This was a low-cost item and the hassle of it all
| made the whole thing such a waste of time and effort.
| johnebgd wrote:
| I've had issues like this. Now I go on LinkedIn and connect with
| executives. After a few connect with me I message them asking if
| they know who I should speak with about account issues.
|
| I also simultaneously use Twitter to reach out to their customer
| service team.
|
| I've had no problems getting help for any kind of issue between
| these parallel efforts.
|
| Twitter is excellent for customer service. Not sure it's good at
| anything else.
| bluGill wrote:
| You were able to call them? I used online support and was told I
| had to call, but they can't give me the number, just refresh
| thier account help page until a.number comes up. That was 3
| months ago, I start refreshing a few times a day, now I don't
| bother.
|
| I have some obscure electronics I'd let fo cheap, but I guess
| I'll have to scrap them. I'm sure the right person would want my
| stuff asked spares but there is no way for us to connect.
| kirykl wrote:
| Something connected to even piece of your PII is likely connected
| to past fraud or unpaid fees. That plus the category and quantity
| of the items you're selling probably triggered this
| Animats wrote:
| peignoir wrote:
| yep same here ebay has lost me as a customer forever, it feels
| insulting to be banned when you know you are a honest customer
| ... must be a bad management choice of being led by the wrong
| KPIs
| pshirshov wrote:
| Same crap. Created an account, listed a GPU (for $700), got
| banned within 5 minutes, no reason, nothing.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Unfortunately that sounds exactly the kind of action that would
| be a high probability for fraud.
| pid-1 wrote:
| That happened to me with Discord.
|
| Signed up, logged in, then was banned.
|
| Luckily I use throwaway emails for everything so I just made
| another.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Did you consider the possibility that the throwaway email
| account is what caused your account to be flagged?
| Aachen wrote:
| Same, discord and twitter both banned. On discord someone
| wanted to chat, so I opened a PM chat with my new account and
| said hi. Super suspicious I guess. On twitter I liked a tweet
| and later wanted to post a tweet but by that point my account
| was banned. Liking a message is very suspicious also I guess.
| Bank account also denied with no reason given (Germany), and
| accounts that advertise with not having to pass the magic
| algorithm check have fees similar to a netflix subscription
| whereas the general public gets it free.
|
| I'm surprised paypal hasn't banned me yet! I avoid using it
| whenever possible anyhow, I'll probably lose access to that
| sooner or later as well.
|
| Somehow this wasn't a problem before the Internet. What did you
| have to do to get banned from access to networks of similar
| size to ebay/twitter, so like a national transport network I
| guess? It's almost unheard of. What causes this? I guess spam
| and fraud are the two categories. How do we fix this at the
| root instead of having secret judges, is having to show
| government ID to the ISP a solution so you can be convicted for
| fraud, and blocking non-compliant ISPs? Seems authoritarian as
| well.
| ghaff wrote:
| Not banned but was shadowblocked from posting on Twitter a
| few years ago. There was nothing I had posted recently that
| was remotely controversial. Filed a ticket, got a response,
| and I could post again in a few days. As others have
| mentioned, the CSR probably doesn't even know why the block
| happened.
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| It's simple economics, dealing with false positives have a
| negative ROI, so these businesses have a fiduciary duty to fuck
| you over..
| stakkur wrote:
| I've had an ebay account continuously since 1999. I never use it
| for selling anymore; the Chinese junk resellers, bias towards
| those kinds of sellers, and ridiculous fees have warned me off. I
| only buy.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I wish there were a third-party arbiter for account management
| that's trusted and most companies use as a last resort. It might
| involve paying a fee to have your case heard with some of it
| refunded if you win. Basically, a way for people to demonstrate
| that they're real and serious about the account, and a way for
| companies to outsource this headache.
| thallium205 wrote:
| Yes it's called arbitration and it's in the eBay ToS.
| IMSAI8080 wrote:
| I noticed your amount was in pounds. If you are in the UK, you
| could try a "Subject Access Request" which legally requires them
| to hand over all relevant personal info that they hold about you.
| People sometimes get lucky with these and it may include any
| comments that have been made about you internally. You can find
| out more about that here:
|
| https://ico.org.uk/your-data-matters/your-right-to-get-copie...
| ziftface wrote:
| And if you do get that somehow please post it, I think a lot of
| people would find it interesting
| uuyi wrote:
| Usual eBay tactics. I'm a long term seller on eBay and it's a
| shit show. The only reason I use it is because the market is the
| best out there.
|
| EBay don't give a crap about anything once fees are collected.
| notch656a wrote:
| I was victim of fraud on e-bay. Someone opened up an account and
| pretended to be me. They opened yet another count as a fake
| seller.
|
| They used my credit card information on the fake buyer account
| and paid the fake seller account.
|
| The fake seller found a real tracking number to my city and
| marked it as shipped.
|
| I filed a chargeback. E-bay would not let me file for a 'return'
| or claim because the account was not 'mine.' When e-bay received
| the chargeback they appealed that the account was actually mine
| and the tracking number was evidenced they received it. The
| e-mail given? Something like "arrrghpirate@hotmail.com" -- they
| taunted me.
|
| Ebay shut down the fraudulent seller but fought tooth and nail
| against the chargeback. They overwhelmed me and my bank with
| paperwork until my bank gave up and threw up their hands.
| Ultimately my bank told me to go fuck myself and that ebay wins,
| even though the tracking number given was for an entirely
| different person and before even the date of the invoice.
|
| Fuck e-bay.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| In the UK, if your bank refuses a chargeback but you still feel
| wronged, you can escalate it to the financial ombudsman or even
| small claims. Is there no further escalation possible in the
| USA?
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| You can complain to the banking regulator that they didn't
| follow the procedures, but that's not really an appeal of the
| decision itself.
|
| You'd have to argue that they either didn't follow procedure
| or did a perfunctory job that did not really comply. However,
| these complaints go to a different team in the bank that may
| just decide to compensate you.
| samtho wrote:
| Yeah, we have small claims where this sort of matter is
| settled. It's very inexpensive in most places to file a claim
| and you don't need an attorney/solicitor.
| thallium205 wrote:
| Will the card contact allow small claims? Doubt it.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The court case would be between you and the entity that
| owes you money - the payment method doesn't matter. In
| fact, this is the same reason that winning a card
| chargeback typically doesn't absolve you from contractual
| obligations towards the seller (though in most cases if
| they lose a card chargeback they have very little to
| stand on in court so they are unlikely to pursue it and
| even less likely to win it).
| dceddia wrote:
| I had a similar problem with buying an item on Swappa - the
| very same "seller found a tracking number going to my town" and
| gave that to PayPal as proof of shipment. It happened oddly
| fast, and the ship-from location didn't match the seller's.
|
| I think this takes advantage of recent-ish changes to shipping
| emails and tracking numbers where they don't show the full
| destination address, presumably for privacy. Yay unintended
| consequences :/
|
| In my case it worked out ok, just took a while. After some back
| and forth with the seller and then going radio-silent, I told
| Swappa, they canceled the sale and banned the seller almost
| immediately, and then I had to file a dispute with PayPal where
| they held my money for a full 30 days before handing it back.
| tyrfing wrote:
| This is a common scam on platforms like eBay, and it seems
| like Paypal's policies in particular make it very hard to get
| your money back.
|
| Tracking numbers can't be considered anything but public
| information, considering both the ease of scraping and all
| the 3rd party sites to enter them on for tracking.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| > Ultimately my bank told me to go fuck myself and that ebay
| wins
|
| The next step is to take it to small claims court, where the
| court doesn't really care what the bank wants and says "no,
| this is their money, and here's a nice hefty fine to convince
| you not to try this person again"
| notch656a wrote:
| Yes you're correct.
|
| Sadly This happened one week before a cross country move to a
| half of the country where there is no representation of this
| bank. It would have cost me as much in hotal and travel fees
| to fly back for the court dates as I would have recouped in
| the claim if I prevailed.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| > Sadly This happened one week before a cross country move
| to a half of the country where there is no representation
| of this bank
|
| That is their problem, not yours. Open the case and let
| them send staff to your local court.
|
| .
|
| > It would have cost me as much in hotal and travel fees to
| fly back for the court dates
|
| You don't have to sue there. Moreover, if it costs you
| money to engage your court process, you make that part of
| the damages. They pay that, and quite possibly tripled.
|
| Talk to a lawyer, please. The law is ready for common
| things.
| notch656a wrote:
| Appreciate the advice! I'll look into it.
| leephillips wrote:
| The court where you moved to doesn't have jurisdiction.
|
| The types of damages you can recover in small claims are
| limited. It's usually just actual damages.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Yeah, that's not just fraud, that's a targeted attack.
| Definitely not getting the whole story here. How'd they get
| your card number?
| danachow wrote:
| How did they get your credit card information? If it was stolen
| then it's a simple fraud case and you're not liable for any of
| it with any major credit card in the US (the federal law
| maximum liability would be $50).
|
| In that case the chargeback reason is simple - the card was
| stolen, these are fraudulent purchases and you are not liable.
| If you have a balance on the credit card you refuse to pay the
| amount. They should remove the charge. And if your bank isn't
| doing the right thing you file a simple online complaint with
| the CFPB. You will get a response in 15 days or so.
|
| Though I'm not exactly sure why your ire is so strongly
| directed towards eBay and not your bank. They sound like the
| real villains here since you are their customer, not eBays.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > In both cases the agent promptly hung up on me.
|
| That sounds odd to me. I've never had an agent hang up on me, let
| alone two.
| magicjosh wrote:
| Exactly, can you imagine how frustrating that would be?
| Vladimof wrote:
| I happened to me many times, but not with Ebay, I think...
| usually they say something like "I can't help you with this but
| let me transfer you" and then click
| varsketiz wrote:
| I assume you are in the UK?
|
| In EU under GDPR I think europeans have the right to demand that
| our data is not processed by an algorithm, but by a human
| instead. You might have a similar right under UK law.
| colinng wrote:
| Just curious, what were you trying to sell? Were any of the items
| prohibited, or something that might run afoul of some law
| somewhere? For example, certain computers or game consoles cannot
| be sold in certain markets (export restrictions), or devices that
| might be used for practical jokes (TV or radio jammers), that
| sort of thing.
|
| It helps readers to know what might in turn get them banned.
|
| Much thanks,
|
| Colin
| robtaylor wrote:
| I had similar - been on there for 19 years buying and selling.
| Recently mainly buying (PSx,xxx in last 12months). Went to sell,
| had to go through some new steps - appeared new sub account for
| sales? Something pinged... boom blocked for life as apparently
| linked to a random account I don't know.
|
| Several call backs over weeks that it will be 'looked at'. Total
| lie.
|
| I can never sell on ebay again, but can buy buy buy.
|
| Anyone from ebay reading this - sort your shit out. It is
| laughable.
| toraway1234 wrote:
| UncleEntity wrote:
| A few years ago I _think_ they wanted to ban me because I had
| never sold anything but listed up something that was just taking
| up space in a closet --IIRC they suspended my account and I had
| to call them to get it reactivated. I also think having an
| account since '01 saved me from the hammer ban as the nice
| customer service agent seemed be surprised I would _gasp_ want to
| sell something on an online auction marketplace after all those
| years.
| noasaservice wrote:
| Reddit did that to my account 4 days ago with a "3 day
| suspension". No reason. No justification. Just "fuck off for 3
| days". No responses either on the appeals.
|
| I'm the owner/head mod for a VERY popular subreddit. I gave it a
| very hard thought about systematically destroying that sub.
|
| It would make 200k people very sad, but in the end, its reddit's
| community that relies on *my* free labor to deal with pornspam
| and ilk. And, it would be me deplatforming 200k people that would
| likely go elsewhere.
|
| I didn't do it. Coolers heads have prevailed... for now. I'm
| still the mod. Nothing's changed. But I've equipped the sub with
| a few alts. If they do that suspension again, then I will respond
| in kind.
|
| I'm frankly tired of being a digital serf with unknown automated
| punishment mechanisms.
| Vladimof wrote:
| you are "lucky" it was a 3-day suspension... they like
| permanent bans, a lot...
| noasaservice wrote:
| And you're 100% right.
|
| And I am really giving it thought in destroying the
| "community" aka reddit's profit motive. Im quite done being a
| "volunteer" kind-of-owner of a subreddit with no support.
|
| My choice probably won't affect that much in the larger
| picture. Maybe it will?
| Vladimof wrote:
| > My choice probably won't affect that much in the larger
| picture. Maybe it will?
|
| if everyone thinks that it won't affect the larger picture
| and do nothing, it probably won't... but who knows... maybe
| a better alternative popping up is all we need...
| bogomipz wrote:
| I had the exact same issue a few years ago. Mine was closer to
| four hours instead of an hour. I was selling a phone for a
| relative. I received an email that the account was suspend and
| when inquired as to what was going on eBay told me that they had
| detected that I was trying to contact the buyer directly which
| was expressly forbidden by their policy. When I explained that I
| had no contact with anyone regarding the item they said they
| would reinstate the account and item. I told them that it was not
| necessary and asked that the account be closed. Ebay is a toxic
| shit hole. It doesn't matter if you are honest and looking to use
| their platform the way it was intended as Ebay the company will
| require you to wade into their toxic shit proactively.
| anon9001 wrote:
| Serious question for HN: How do we replace eBay with a reliable,
| sensibly run public service?
|
| It's extremely disheartening that it's now 2022 and we haven't
| figured out a way to replace eBay.
|
| It's the most basic form of commerce. Select a product from the
| listings, check the seller's reputation based on how active the
| seller is, ask a few questions, finalize a transaction. On rare
| occasion, in some markets, adjudicate a dispute.
|
| Everyone in the world should be able to have access to this
| service for essentially free.
|
| eBay is such a basic thing that it was started as a hobby because
| of course people should be able to buy and sell online with
| minimal friction. It's obvious.
|
| Why don't we make new things like this anymore?
|
| I hear all this hype about the fediverse and web3 and crypto, but
| the reality is that the public cannot even reliably send messages
| to each other without invoking a big tech company.
|
| Crypto barely works and there have been billions of dollars made
| and lost just trying to keep track of account balances.
|
| It feels like we're forever away from having a well run public
| global market.
|
| Uber and Twitter and Netflix and eBay and the rest of the
| "essential" services seem so basic, but we can't seem to get
| enough nerds together to start replacing them.
|
| We're each individually globally connected with more bandwidth
| than I ever thought would fit in my pocket.
|
| But I can't hail a ride without involving Uber.
|
| I can't deliver a 140 character message to a lot of people
| without involving Twitter.
|
| We can't crowdfund the creation of great art, unless we all pay
| Netflix to do it for us.
|
| > Don't use eBay.
|
| And, as OP is soon to notice, it's very hard to sell used
| electronics without using eBay.
|
| What can we actually do, today, as hackers, to replace eBay?
|
| If I was actually going to do it, where would I start? Would
| replacing eBay be a government project, a web3 project, a
| federated network?
|
| Is there actual hacktivism to be done here by simply replacing
| services with p2p equivalents without engaging in the current
| corporate system?
|
| I've had enough of relying on companies for what should be human
| to human services.
| Blammar wrote:
| I always thought Ebay's fundamental design error was that it
| did not serve as a true escrow agent.
|
| Yes, that would have been difficult to scale, but then you'd
| not need a fraud department at all as both sides would be able
| to verify the transaction.
|
| Seems like a business opportunity here.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Out of curiosity, how would an escrow agent work against
| malicious actors (without the law serving as a deterrent,
| since enforcement against online fraud is near non-existent)?
|
| Scammers are already tricking PayPal's dispute system by
| sending real tracking numbers and sometimes even real
| _packages_ but filled with bricks or other junk.
|
| Imagine a situation where the buyer is malicious and claims
| they have received a brick. If you settle in favour of the
| buyer, sellers lose out, but if you settle in favour of the
| seller, buyers would lose out from scam sellers sending
| bricks instead of the promised goods.
|
| A neutral party such as the shipping courier would have to
| act as a witness and unpack the goods on delivery to mitigate
| that, and even then it's not bulletproof if the goods have a
| defect that isn't immediately obvious.
| the_cat_kittles wrote:
| if your account is established enough not to trip whatever
| crude fraud algorithm they have, ebay is an extremely
| convenient and efficient way of buying and selling stuff. maybe
| its because ive done it for a while so im used to it, but im
| always suprised when people complain about ebay. i think you
| get into real trouble if you expect it to be 100% perfect, but
| if you just accept that every now you might get screwed and
| dont put all your eggs in one basket, it works very well.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I'm not sure account lifetime is a factor - on an old account
| I remember getting (very obvious) scam messages sent to me
| from long-established accounts that have presumably been
| compromised. If anything, account lifetime might work against
| you if you log in with an IP address or browser fingerprint
| that's too different from the account's history.
| [deleted]
| c1u31355 wrote:
| Check out OpenBazaar, it's more or less the idea you're
| describing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBazaar
| photon-torpedo wrote:
| P2P market places already exists, I guess. The tricky part is
| how parties can trust each other, and I think this might
| actually be solvable by blockchain / smart contract tech.
| Basically a smart contract takes the role of the trusted
| intermediary / escrow account. I believe this is being worked
| on (e.g. Nexus ASA on the Algorand blockchain).
| notatoad wrote:
| serious answer: you don't. the idea that anybody should be able
| to sell to anybody else is fundamentally invalid. global-scale
| marketplaces are a bad idea, because as soon as money starts
| changing hands, then fraud becomes a risk and the sort of
| impersonal, evil-seeming anti-fraud actions that ebay takes
| become a necessity.
|
| nobody has any inherent rights to selling on ebay. they do
| their analisys, and determine if you're a fraud risk worth
| taking on or not. and if they don't want to take on the risk of
| allowing you to use their platform, they ban you. just like
| they did to the OP here. it's not evil, it's just the only
| responsible behaviour for a global platform that allows anybody
| to sell anything to anybody else. Any other platform reaching
| eBay's scale will have to do the same thing.
|
| Facebook marketplace can do a bit better, because facebook has
| an absolutely absurd amount of your personal information that
| they can mine to determine your fraud risk. Some other small-
| scale indie services can pretend to do better, but the only
| thing that allows them to do better is their small scale.
| Online classifieds like ebay's Kijiji subsidiary can do better
| because they don't handle the transaction, and you take on your
| own fraud risk and only deal in-person.
|
| at some level, every service that does this has to answer the
| question of "how do we deal with fraud risk" and the answer to
| that always has to be forbidding some set of people from using
| the platform.
| mswen wrote:
| I went to buy something on eBay and found that my account had
| been suspended. I have never sold anything on eBay. However, I
| had signed up for an eBay developer account and then never used
| it because the client who I was exploring it for went another
| direction. So I thought maybe it was related to the unused
| developer account. The support person couldn't really tell me
| anything but said I could contact some part of support for an
| appeal so I asked that they send me an email with that process.
| They said yes, our chat is automatically emailed to me. But no
| email followed up that support experience.
|
| Very poor support. No explanation and action including actions
| that are promised on their support page.
| bitL wrote:
| I once listed >10k worth of equipment on eBay (spring cleaning)
| and got instantly banned as well. However, in my case I explained
| all to eBay support and they put me back on. So try again and
| again until you get to somebody willing to speak to you.
|
| I once had an Amazon seller ban right after enlisting items and
| it just went into an infinite automated loop which looked like
| "give us a proof!" "here is the proof" "give us a proof!" etc.
| Back then I didn't know you had to literally bribe Amazon
| managers via some "external consultancies" (friends) to reinstate
| you back. Maybe eBay is doing the same now...
| mNovak wrote:
| Amusingly, I got banned from eBay Partner Network (e.g. affiliate
| links) after my hobby site got a little traction in a HN comment.
| Banned within hours; they responded to my emails, only enough to
| say the ban was being upheld.
|
| So as a regular reminder, be wary of relying on the good graces
| of a giant corporation for your monetization!
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| It's amazing how badly Ebay has fallen. I was an early adopter
| decades ago, and used it to buy and sell all kinds of trinkets
| and collectibles that were virtually impossible to buy/sell/trade
| locally.
|
| The first major crack in the armor came when they removed the
| ability of sellers to leave feedback for buyers. Feedback was the
| only way you could figure out who was a scammer and/or someone
| difficult that ought to be avoided. It also acted as a deterrent
| for buyers who were prone to making demands and/or trying to
| extort a discount after having "won" an auction, as their account
| would be marked as shady for future transactions. This led me to
| stop selling on Ebay, and just use for it a few purchases.
|
| Recently, after many years away, I cleaned out my spare room and
| fired up Ebay to sell a relatively low-value (couple hundred $)
| item. I found that I was no longer able to use Paypal, but
| instead prompted to give all of my banking information to Ebay.
| After the item sold, I was informed by Ebay that my money would
| be held by Ebay for 6 weeks as a "safety measure". After 29 days
| (1 day from the maximum 30 days time to report a problem) the
| "buyer" filed a dispute saying the item had not been received
| (despite the item having been shipped with tracking and confirmed
| to have been delivered 29 days before). Ebay reflexively sided
| with the "buyer", and, long story short, I was forced to refund
| the money, without getting the item back, and with Ebay keeping
| their fees.
|
| After that debacle I immediately tried to remove my banking
| information and close by Ebay account, only to find out that Ebay
| doesn't allow you to remove your banking information, and you
| cannot close your account (only start a process that allows your
| account to be closed after a month, at Ebay's discretion).
|
| Needless to say I will never be using Ebay to buy or sell
| anything again.
| trasz wrote:
| The root of the problem is that services like eBay or Google
| don't have any incentive to handle this properly. It's the same
| reason they don't care about quality or reliability of services
| they provide (although eBay really isn't as bad compared to
| google), they only care about keeping up appearances.
|
| It's not a technical problem, and not a problem specific to eBay.
| The only way to fix it is to introduce laws forcing companies to
| handle those cases properly.
| tamaharbor wrote:
| People don't realize the problem with the internet, social media,
| Amazon, eBay, Facebook, etc. until it hits them in the head from
| an opposite direction.
| more_corn wrote:
| A eBay rep killed my project by flagging the account for fraud
| after I asked to speak to supervisor (she refused three times and
| the account was magically flagged the next day). All of my
| listings got suspended. It made the whole project untenable
| costing the client thousands. There was no fraud, there were no
| signals of fraud , just petty spite. I'll never use eBay for
| anything important. Nobody should ever use eBay for anything that
| matters.
| squarefoot wrote:
| I've been a happy Ebay user for 14 years, 100% positive feedback
| both as a seller and buyer, and the rare problems were always
| solved promptly by the support. They once even called me to give
| support on sunday and were extremely polite and supportive.
|
| Now does this mean Ebay is perfect? Nope, not even close, but
| hanging up users calls sounds very new to me; please, if there is
| more to this story let us know.
|
| On a second thought, you may have triggered some of their scam
| detection algorithms. I built my reputation in years by initially
| buying and selling small parts and objects, then more expensive
| devices and instrumentation, and would never trust anyone with a
| fresh account and no feedback points suddenly selling stuff for
| hundreds pounds. However, hanging up your call still isn't the
| proper way of giving support, so I'd like to know more if there
| is more.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| OP: _On both phone calls I asked to speak to a supervisor. In
| both cases the agent promptly hung up on me._
|
| I know little about EBay but if caller just immediately
| demanded a supervisor and did not accept any other result, the
| agent hanging up on them might be the logical result. Any large
| organization has to have standard procedures and "I'm
| escalating immediately before I get my result" can't be allowed
| in this situation 'cause everyone would do it.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Yeah, a brand-new, zero feedback account selling used consumer
| electronics screams fence, unfortunately for those who are
| doing it legitimately.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| In this case, what's the proper set of steps to level up your
| account so you can sell electronics?
|
| I got my account banned instantly despite having a
| significant history as a guest buyer (with same email &
| delivery address) as well as an old account with a successful
| 4-figure sale that I ended up deactivating long ago.
|
| Also, if selling electronics (or any other risky categories)
| is a no-go and an instant ban, why not just prevent posting
| such listings to begin with, or require additional
| verification upfront to deter malicious activity?
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Sell one at a time.
| blondin wrote:
| this cannot be the solution.
|
| something that is immediately better is allowing users to
| tell the system that you are setting up an inventory.
| just imagine people opening an account to do some online
| e-commerce and trying to set up their inventory...
| lamontcg wrote:
| Or it is someone who doesn't bother with the hassle of trying
| to sell things over the internet and ship them, etc for items
| worth less than $100. They're a SWE who is making $200k/yr,
| overworked, already have other hobbies and selling something
| on ebay for $100 just isn't worth the mental effort to them.
|
| So they could very legitimately have half a dozen old
| electronic items worth around about $1,000 per item when they
| first start trying to sell things.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| That's literally my case - it's not worth the hassle to
| sell small items as I can just keep them, but wanted to get
| rid of some bulky server & network equipment as it was
| taking up significant space (fairly niche & specialized, I
| can't imagine those having much malicious activity around
| them).
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-05-08 23:00 UTC)