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Your eBay account has been suspended
211 points by quisquous on Dec 3, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 141 comments
Got an email from eBay this morning:

" Hello brokeninfinity, We wanted to let you know that your eBay account has been permanently suspended because of activity that we believe was putting the eBay community at risk. We understand that this must be frustrating, but this decision was not made lightly and it’s important that we keep our marketplace safe for everyone. Learn more about how and why accounts can be suspended... "

I'm a long time, infrequent eBay user, mostly buy stuff, 331 stars, 100% feedback rating. Haven't used eBay recently, no idea what just happened. Maybe someone was trying to hack my account? The suspension email has no reply address. I tried contact eBay through their web chat, and they say 'Sorry Scott, live support's currently unavailable.'

I guess I'll stop using eBay now. The summary execution with no explanation and no escalation path and no appeal is not endearing. Count me added to the chorus of folks calling for regulations that will eliminate this sort of abusive behavior against consumers. We need some sort of 'due process' required of companies that operate above a certain scale. I mean, I shudder to think of the position I would be in right now if I depended on eBay for anything important. Thank goodness for me that I do not, but not everyone can say the same.

What do you think?




Agreed with your sentiment that there needs to be some due process for these companies. Amazon has been holding $24,000 of my seller accounts proceeds for a year now stating that I "violated their TOS" by using the same IP address as my girlfriend uses (who was also an Amazon Seller). Both my and her accounts had perfect selling histories; weren't selling anything against tos, etc.

I've been wanting to take them to court over it; but most lawyers have quoted me at the process costing ~$8-9k; which, I'm terrified to be on the hook for if I lose. (I guess I did violate their TOS? But if that is their TOS, it's wildly stupid and should be illegal/not hold up in court).

So, they just have the money I use to buy food for me and my family and there is nothing I can do about it. The level of stress it's brought me over the last year...has been unimaginable for me if I were to ponder it before the situation occurred.

I still always have the hope that I'll recover it some time, some how, if consumer regulations change or if Elizabeth Warren gets her way. But for now it's me against them and they clearly are making whatever calls they want.


Did you try consulting some government authorities, about your case specifically?

$24K is a lot of money for most small businesses (or family side gigs), and most people can't afford to out-lawyer a huge company. Fortunately, one of the ideal roles of government is to protect the small from the large.

Were it me, since I'm in the US, but don't know which government authority would be most appropriate or effective, I'd probably first try my state AG's office. I'd ask if they're interested in this, and could look into it, or if they could suggest what other authority to ask.

If you ran out of topical government authorities, I suppose you could then contact your Congressperson's office, which could be a wildcard hero.

(The fashion is to Tweet one's way to customer service, but I still believe that government institutions can work.)


I guess this is my version of tweeting into the void hoping that someone helps me figure out what to do :).

It is a lot of money.

It's funny because I am from and live in Seattle; and post of the local political will currently is against Amazon, but I don't know if that would work in my favor. I actually tried to contact the AG before and got a "we'll get back to you" and didn't hear anything. I didn't follow up because I didn't know if helping in a situation like this was part of their wheelhouse. I guess I'll pose the question to them again alongside the more general question of whether it's relevant to their office or not. Thank you!


I wonder what would happen if you went to Amazon's lobby and chained yourself to something solid? Would at least get some press. The only way to get these sorts of things fixed now is to have a large megaphone.


Don't tempt me.

They are constantly trying to hire me as a SDE. I'm this close to taking it so I can get inside and start raising hell about this.


State Attorneys Genral love this kind of stuff rather than a city level prosecutor. Much more clout at the state level, and it's a great way to get their names in the news on their way to governor.


>I've been wanting to take them to court over it; but most lawyers have quoted me at the process costing ~$8-9k; which, I'm terrified to be on the hook for if I lose.

You could try to crowdfund a lawsuit (promise to donate the crowdfunding to a charity if you win and get costs). I suspect more than a few Sellers would like to get back at Amazon.


That's an interesting idea. However, I am terrified that if I do show up in court and do lose for whatever reason, then I will forever lose my chance at recuperating the funds. Maybe someday, they will realize that banning me was an error or the laws will change, and the decision will be reversed and the funds will be disbursed to me. I don't want to do something dumb and lose that opportunity. I've actually had a successful crowdfunding campaign in the past, but I do feel like raising money for something like this would just be shouting at a wall.


IMHO, even if the rules do change someday, it's not likely Amazon would return the money: it's an administrative burden going over old records of Sellers that might not even be alive anymore, and which boss which like to make his department look worse in the financial reports just to refund some Seller which must have forgot about their money?

It's much more likely Amazon will return the money if the ban is undone, after all, undoing it is basically admitting wrongdoing. However they haven't done it so far; Perhaps they feel they were right to ban you?

Well, it's easy for me to suggest action when I won't have to do the work. It's your money after all. I hope whatever you choose will work for you.


Well, I have a lot of records (screenshots in the app, downloaded reports, etc); and I am paying attention closely to the news around antitrust and other items affecting amazon sellers so I believe I'd know if something were to change here.

I don't think they feel right or wrong. I have talked to multiple customer support agents who have told me that I will get the money; or that they want to help me get it, but they have to forward it to X team and that team has to forward it to Y team and then nothing just ever gets done because somewhere down the line a team stops following through or whatever.

They don't feel any way about it. They are simply indifferent. It's a deal so insignificant to them that they don't even notice it even though it's been the #1 or #2 (next to my job) the center of attention for me over the last year.


You are limited in how far back you can sue for damages. Running out of time is vastly more likely than Amazon to suddenly decide to hand you 24k.


Did you do the "cheap" first step? Which is to say: pay a lawyer $300 to write a threatening letter, asking for the ban to be undone and immediate return of the funds.


They almost definitely have an arbitration clause in the agreement, since companies like Amazon, eBay, Airbnb wish to avoid going to court altogether so as not to establish a precedent. This could be favorable to you because they are more likely to settle without either party incurring a lot in legal expenses, but on the other hand it's likely that the arbitration clause asks that each party split the arbitration cost (typically under $5,000 each) regardless of the outcome.

I'm not an attorney but I've dealt with situations like yours. If I were you, I would pursue the arbitration because they are likely to settle.


Yeah, I have talked to other sellers and lawyers and Amazon would take it to arbitration if I decide to pursue. I believe the cost of going to arbitration against them is $8000 in Seattle; because I have to pay the arbitrator, my own lawyer and other related fees. I should have specified above that I'd be going to arbitration against them and not to court--I didn't expect anyone to read my comment.

Unfortunately though, I've heard from most sellers in a similar situation that Amazon almost always wins in these arbitration cases. I'm not sure if that's true or not but the amazon sellers forums are ominous on this point. I posted this question there a month ago [0] and invoked a lively debate; but the gist was that it's risky and I could easily expect to lose. How unfair is that.

Maybe everyone on the forum is wrong though and they would be likely to settle. I honestly have no idea because I've heard every manner of different answers.

https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/suing-amazon-for-n...


I expect Amazon to bring an entire legion of lawyers against you in a situation like this and basically bury the arbitrator in paperwork.

Does the contract say if Amazon would have to pay all your fees if you win? Or would you be out either way. Usually in court in the USA you often lose all your legal costs even if you do win.


I feel like it would probably somehow go poorly like you're outlining. I have a naive version in my head as to how this could work out well; but I imagine in reality that this would be as nightmarish and stressful as possible, ending in a loss and putting me even further into the hole financially.

It's just so messed up. $24K of my money that they're holding; that's not all profit for me. It probably cost me at least $12K to generate that $24k. So I'm already so far in the hole that I can't afford to keep going deeper.


You're not going to go from 0 to $8k in legal expenses that quickly.

See if you can find a lawyer that you can trust, ideally one who has experience with this kinda thing to give you an opinion.

A good lawyer will be frank about whether or not the cost to engage is worth it. Others are probably correct in saying there is probably an arbitration clause involved.

You might just find that a letter from a lawyer might lead Amazon to reconsider their decision to hold your funds.

Also I'd be wary of lawyers quoting you a flat fee like 8k to "take care of it". I had to deal with a completely different legal issue several years ago. Some lawyers gave an up front figure of like $5k-$9k or something. Ended up consulting with an attorney at an agreed hourly rate of ~$300/hr or something. Ended up using less than an hour of his actual time to consider the situation and give me legal advice. Ended up only paying a few hundred for the whole thing.


Do crowdfunding and you'll get help. At least mine.


That is very kind of you, thank you!


What is the TOS that you’re violating? Are you responsible for someone else using the same internet connection somehow?


Check the limits for small claims court in your state. Some of them go up to 20-25k.


Thanks; unfortunately I think it's only $10,000 in washington state.


I had just posted up thread a recommendation about contacting your state AG about this kind of situation. However, if you're in Washington State, the state AG might not be too interested in taking on a large employer in their state. Or maybe they'd be even more motivated riding the anti-AMZN wave.???


Not only a large employer; the largest. What an unfortunate coincidence for me then. The anti-amazon sentiment is real, maybe I should wait for their next large PR fiasco and try to ride that wave. Thanks for the tip, I will still pursue it and see if it goes anywhere.


How fucked is your government if either of these things are a deciding factor around helping a wronged citizen?


I wonder if you could file different small claims suits for logical parts of the money they are holding, like one for Q1 earned revenue, another for Q2 earned revenue, etc.

That would be more leverage in that they would have to send a lawyer to every one of them.


Sorry that happened to you.

As some HNers know I have a long-time hobby of working customer service state machines, and I'm going to take the liberty of writing the most effective resolution path here for the general case, in case you or other HNers ever need to solve this.

Live chat is probably staffed by external agents and they may have the least ability in the various tiers of the CS hierarchy to help with problems, particularly hard problems requiring substantial judgement. Your princess in in another castle. It is quite possible that there is a business decision made to not let live agents speak to you for fear that a scammer will outmaneuver this tier of agent into getting a reinstatement by pretending to be a legitimate customer confused as to why they suddenly had their account deactivated.

There is a team which makes these sort of decisions (even if they also support teams which implement computer systems that make these decisions at scale), and they also unmake these decisions. You generally can route messages to that team by going in through email support, particularly email support for businesses.

If you cannot, there is also a team which handles internal escalations, and your objective is to find a public-facing individual who will file a ticket with them. This always, always, always includes the Legal department and Investor Relations, and may include e.g. their Comms people, social media people, etc etc. For businesses which tend towards the traditional/stody, I generally used to recommend paper letters to Legal/IR/Office of the President/etc, but for businesses which trend towards tech industry (and increasingly in finance), at messaging them on Twitter from an account that looks like very plausibly a human will often achieve the same effect.

Ignore basically everything they say in your message to the person attempting to achieve an internal escalation, and stick with the facts of your business relationship: I've been a user for N years, believe my account was deactivated in error, wish to continue being a user, and would like to reverse this decision. What information do they need to quickly come to this decision? In the alternative, can they please justify it in writing with specificity to you; you've already read the material they sent you but it clearly doesn't apply to your case.

It is generally not instrumentally effective to be angry.

The symptom you are detecting is downstream of a larger set of business decisions which weren't made for malice. Those decisions have a false positive rate. The business made a series of decisions with regards to false positives, customer support costs, escalation pathways, cost to operate them, etc. All of that is irrelevant to you, though; you just want to present like a professional who wants their account back, and in particular, you want to present like a professional who is very organized and motivated. Organized and motivated professionals who are savvy enough to write Investor Relations to get what they want are the start of a lot of stories which have cost e.g. financial firms a lot of money, because they're capable of collecting paper trails and submitting them to e.g. regulators, and they're detected and dealt with early in the process.

Best of luck and skill.

Disclaimer: comment written in personal capacity. I have some amount of knowledge of how this works professionally and some amount of knowledge from spending years ghostwriting letters into the financial industry on behalf of people who, demographically speaking, generally do not resemble the typical HNer with this problem, but who also felt incapable of avoiding the runaround.


An aside for HNers, which I write as someone who had his first job in customer service: please remember, when interacting with customer service agents (and the various ops folks at companies that hire from very similar talent pools), that you (very likely, if you are on HN) are in a ridiculously fortunate position in life relative to the customer service agent, and that they did not write the state machine that made the poor decision about you. They're just following the arrows on that state machine.

You either want to discover the inputs needed to get the state machine to give you the outcome you want, or, you want to get this issue kicked from the CS/etc person you're talking to a fellow well-compensated professional who has substantial discretionary decisionmaking ability. None of this requires getting intemperate with a person who makes very little money and has a frequently soulcrushing job.


Thanks for this addendum, this is important. I'd also emphasize the practical effect that our rudeness/friendliness can have. I experienced this last year when we were trying to get care for my father after he was nearly killed by COVID. The hospital wanted to send him home before he was able to care for himself, and we wanted the hospital to discharge him to rehab instead.

My sister's initial strategy was to go full Karen and treat the patient care coordinator like she was my sister's employee. She adapted to the coordinator's natural reticence with increasing bitchiness, and quickly got her calls screened.

My father on the verge of getting kicked out while still in dire need of care, I called the same coordinator, explained our dilemma in detail, said I don't know what to do, and asked for her help. My magic spell was simply to treat the coordinator as a resourceful and intelligent person who was in a position to help me, and ask her plainly for help. That's it. The coordinator told me she'd see what she could do, and then spent the next two days searching for a solution. When she found a way to get my dad into rehab for a few days, I told her she was my hero.

I try to treat even the most obviously external and powerless customer service reps with the same plain respect as that patient coordinator, and I'm often surprised by how far it gets me.


>please remember, when interacting with customer service agents (and the various ops folks at companies that hire from very similar talent pools), that you (very likely, if you are on HN) are in a ridiculously fortunate position in life relative to the customer service agent

I agree with the sentiment that 'you attract more flies with honey than vinegar' with regards to customer service folks, but disagree with the trope that HN-users (or computer-job-people in general) are somehow privileged and in a fortunate place in life simply due to where they hang out online or the categorization of work they do.

I also disagree with the stereotyping of customer service workers as disadvantaged.

simply put : I disagree with uninformed characterizations. I don't know anything about the life of the customer service worker that I need to call, and they don't know anything about mine; to assume anything with what little we both know about each other is a recipe for inaccurate profiling.

"try walking a mile in my shoes" isn't a literal request to learn more about the person you're judging, it's advice that suggests that 'the other' is ultimately unknowable and that presumption is worthless.

judge their job and the quality of that, maybe some accurate generalizations can be made about their job; I can agree that most customer-service work is low quality, grueling, and sometimes abusive.

Don't extrapolate judgements borne from work presumptions into 'total life quality & stature'; a person is more and has more than the work they do.


It's not so much that the customer service people are advantaged/disadvantaged or helpful/unhelpful that, in my opinion, makes it a compete waste of time ringing them. It's the fact that they have no real ability to solve any of your problems which are not down to error on your part.

The turnover of staff in call centres is continual and few people last long in the job. So the person you speak to is doubtless barely trained, knows nothing much about how the company works and, when speaking to you, is working from a script along the lines of _"Customer has problem A -- Suggest solution B"_. So is highly unlikely to be able to do anything to help you, if your problem is not on their script --and they have no authority to make any decisions beyond the most standard basic procedures, anyway.


Because my accounts are so old and I have so many of them, I get a message regularly saying that my account for service xyz has been suspended. When I contact them there a) never is a good reason for why it was done (hint; it is usually because they started using or recently updated some AI fraud detection service) b) small companies easily restore your account; with big ones it is usually game over. Ebay (and Paypal) are rather notorious for this: PayPal has actually gotten more robust but now I actually cannot close my account. They don't know why but computer says no; it is an ancient account, so, as a software engineer, I can take a few guesses. The most annoying is the level of support: even if the support is polite and responsive and human to begin with, which is not often at big companies (note I do not live in the US so I get routed to my country support for that bigcorp; I do not know if support is better over there), they often have no clue what they are talking about and only have canned responses. You used to be able to escalate to another level but that seems to have been removed (too expensive of course).

So when I can I stick with small companies; when they get funded or taken over, I find an alternative. I manage small SaaS products myself and I definitely will never leave anyone hanging, not even for a few hours; many small companies have the same feeling.

Of course, often you cannot do anything else but take the large ones. Luckily with banking this changed over the past years, but plenty things are still utterly broken support (and because you need support, also software wise probably) wise.


Never leave your brokerage account unattended, make sure to be active.

The NPR Planet Money episode "Escheat Show" follows the story of a man who bought some Amazon stock long ago, and purposely never logged in to his online account, letting the stock multiply into a presumed small fortune. Years later he found that due to his inactivity the account had been deemed by his state (Connecticut?) as lost property years prior, liquidated, and entered into the state's escheat program, where one can claim lost property. The stock had been liquidated at a much lower price than its present worth. He wanted to sue since his intention was to leave the stock untouched for years but found there were some complications. He's currently waiting for the stock to hit a valuation where a great lawyer will be tempted to take it on contingency while still leaving himself a fortune.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2020/01/24/799345159/episode-967-escheat...


What would be the tort? Usually bank accounts are considered dormant after around 3 years.

Ignorance of the law doesn’t make exempt from it.


That's interesting, I wonder if I have an 'uncloseable' PayPal account, since it started as an x.com account in '99 when they were giving people $20 to open one.


Mine is a business account which was migrated from a personal account from over 2 decades ago; I tried to close it for over a year.


I wonder what would cause an account to be unclosable, never heard of such a thing.


Your guess is as good as mine, but some kind of logical deadlock and no support person (managers included) is allowed to resolve it?


For years this was the case on GoDaddy accounts. They've only changed the policy (probably due to GDPR/CCPA) some years ago. Old thread on them refusing to delete accounts: https://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=879982


Didn’t PayPal start charging you for maintaining an account?


I recently had to sell a MacBook Pro. Decided to open an eBay account because I never use eBay, and pretty much immediately had it banned.

I stripped the EXIF data from the laptop’s photos for fear of eBay not removing them for me - I didn’t want my GPS info exposed. I also accessed the website without a VPN and a fresh Firefox profile with only uBlock Origin. I own a clean email domain and used it for the account. I also verified my bank accounts the next morning.

I was banned 20 minutes after posting my listing and received the same message as OP - live chat is not currently available, and their fraud support line redirects to their discontinued phone number. Even after verifying my bank details the next day, nothing changed.

I wasn’t trying to scam anyone. I just wanted to try and sell something I legitimately owned. eBay locked me out completely with no recourse or proper justification. Truly awful company. Shocked that it’s even functioning with this level of “support”.


At least you hadn't shipped the MacBook out, to then get banned and lose the MacBook; which has certainly happened to a lot of people based on anecdotes I've read in the past.


That would have been horrifying.

I ended up selling the MacBook Pro locally via Facebook Marketplace, but only after rejecting 20+ people trying to get me to ship it across the country and paying me via PayPal.

I really do wonder often - at a certain point, does every company just simply become an anti-fraud service more than their original product? How much time and money do Google, eBay, Amazon, etc. spend fighting fraud? It’s unfortunate that businesses have to bake this kind of turmoil into their business model.


When I open an eBay account I buy a few dozen small items to get some positive feedback first. Shouldn't have to do such stupidity, but it's the only way to get yourself some "credit history".


That was just a collateral damage. There are so many scammers and your behaviors were so suspicious to eBay. To those large organizations, simply ban you straight away would be the least costly solution AFAIK.


It’s a crappy truth, but you’re right in some respects. I did convince myself of this when it happened, and just acknowledged that eBay was a service I’ll probably never have access to.

Someone else I know and trust offered to sell it for me after I told them I was banned. They have legitimate sales and positive seller reputation that they’ve made, but I was absolutely not willing to risk their seller account getting banned too.

Shoot, they’ll probably get banned at some point too, because we have used the same IP at least once.

eBay failing to provide a functional chat and verification service to correct wrongful bans is the problem here. A company needs to provide a process for resolving its mistakes. People will stop using their service.


Wow, I had almost exact same experience and had two more people in my coworking space encounter the same issue basically in the same month - we all tried to sell rather expensive stuff (300-600$ range) and were instantly suspended and no we didn't list it from the same IP.

Does ebay even get new users these days? I bet their banned user table has more rows than the active user one :D


To be fair, I doubt you'd have got any offers for the laptop anyway. Even if eBay hadn't blocked your account. I certainly wouldn't buy a laptop from a new account with zero feedback.


So you can either implement optimal privacy hygiene, OR you can get access to services.

An awkward counterpoint.

This is actually interesting.

You basically executed perfectly on the supposed ultimate solution to staying in control of your data online, at the ideal level most wouldn't have the motivation/discipline to sustain... and it got your account revoked.

Of course it's extremely easy to understand why; you also happened to do everything a fraudulent user would do in trying to cover their tracks. And eBay's detection logic somehow figured that out, and I have to concede the point that it worked as intended. :(

This reveals where we're currently at: eBay can't tell you apart from a scammer, in the same way YouTube doesn't really know who I am and what I want to watch (the homepage feels like a hodgepodge of "throw everything at the wall" and more than anything else carries a fair bit of cognitive dissonance because it's kinda getting it right but just... not).

AI can't discern intention yet... because we're not feeding it enough data.

I'm not sure whether to be cynical, melancholy, viscerally depressed, angry ("man shakes fist at cloud") or what about the fact that the only way to prove individuals' legitimacy and authenticity is to basically mechanize and industrial level of private information sharing.

Naturally you've passed Facebook's bar for authenticity - it's analyzed the data you've provided explicitly, data you provide by interacting with the service, and data provided by those you interact with, and approved it - and so your account is not blocked there, and you can transact.

Considering the child comment you made about anti-fraud-as-a-service, it's kind of sad there isn't a way to allow eBay to access and evaluate the trust ranking Facebook has built. Kind of a "sign in with Facebook" sort of thing, except with a lot more data exchange going on behind the scenes.

A system like this would necessarily need to share a reasonable quantity of data, to overcome the same root-of-trust problems that eg makes fingerprint readers built into laptops generally worthless because they all merely send back a binary (yes/no) "OK, unlock" over USB after processing the fingerprint input inside the controller. (Yep.) Just sharing someone's email address and a binary "this person is legit" flag would expose eg Facebook to 100% of liability if that (entirely automated) decision was incorrect. This idea has almost certainly been thought of a lot and unilaterally shot down within 10 seconds. (Haha, it might even make a good interview question, whoever thinks it sounds good for more than 5 minutes maybe isn't great for a security position initially.)

Further, different services (Facebook, Amazon (online; Whole Foods), Apple, Netflix, Google, eBay, Walmart, etc, ad infinitum) engage with users in different ways, using different risk profiles, and the consolidated summaries of the risk assessments each company builds wouldn't be compatible with each other - at the policy level, because by definition this information is the proprietary, ostensibly-infinitely-valuable thing a company never, ever shares.

Getting something like this to work would be nigh impossible, and would hard-require both incentivization and regulation. I'm not sure how it would get off the ground even then, in much the same way the notion of a car would never pass approval today. (Hmm, but then we have Teslas driving themselves around off the back of utterly sketchy^W^WProprietary™ image processing, so maybe there's a twisted, messed-up chance, hahaha.)

I guess "interoperability" (in name only, lol) would basically look like companies sharing raw metrics and gross inputs and whatnot... oh man, it'd be a dumpster fire of incompatible implementations... and companies would absolutely try to get a leg up on each other by modeling what they shared in increasingly inscrutable ways that skate the line of the regulations.

Because at the end of the day internalizing anti-fraud-as-a-service is kind of a practical competitive thing to do.

Heh, the one thing would would definitely come out of something like this would be an entire ecosystem of startups promising to normalize the evaluation process. I wonder how long it would take for AI to bring us back to the broken position we're in today?


> We wanted to let you know that your eBay account has been permanently suspended because of activity that we believe was putting the eBay community at risk.

My eyes cannot physically roll any further. I recently bought an SD card from eBay. It was 256 GB and when I plug it in to my computer it reported more space. Some odd multiple like 261 GB. I ran f3 [1] and found sure enough the card did not have the storage it promised.

I asked eBay for a refund. They refunded me. I gave the seller a negative review in an effort to warn other prospective buyers. eBay refused to ban the seller. Further the seller sent me an eBay message threatening me for my negative review and eBay did nothing.

What is happening to you, if you genuinely did nothing wrong, is a symptom of some alpha-level ML/algorithm-based fraud detection that was made by some data scientist with poor data or no clue. And support is not trained to address this.

[1] https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduct...


I bought some heat-shrink off Amazon once, for an electrical project. I ordered "1cm diameter". When it came, it was 2cm in diameter. I kept it as it was too cheap an item to bother returning and it would probably come in handy some time anyway.

As per your 'warning to others' notion I wrote a review that simply said "Be aware that this heat-shrink is actually 2cm diameter. Looks like someone at Amazon doesn't know the difference between diameter and radius"

Pretty light-hearted, I thought. But I got an email off Amazon saying my review had not been published as it was 'offensive' and 'blah... blah... T&C... blah... blah... no personal attacks'. Sometimes, the hyper-sensitivity of these companies is breath-taking.


I posted this in another thread on the same subject:

Not exactly related but: a couple of weeks ago I suddenly had my account 'restricted' on eBay and told I could no longer sell or receive payment for anything I'd sold until I uploaded a load of personal ID documents [passport / driving licence, etc] to confirm my identity. This, after I'd been buying and selling on eBay for 19+ years. Browsing their 'community' forum, it became clear that eBay have done this to loads of people recently, including many who had been members even longer than me. What disgusted me even more than this obnoxious privacy invasion was the number of people on the forum who'd actually sent eBay all the required documentation instead of telling them to go fuck themselves.

Luckily I had no uncleared payments in my account. So I've just stopped using eBay. It's just a pity there's no viable alternative. Nothing like a bit of healthy competition to help rein in the jaw-dropping arrogance of these mega-corporations.

EDIT:

  > The summary execution with no explanation and no escalation path and no appeal is not endearing
Agreed. I've had this happen to me before with Twitter as well. Got 3 accounts suddenly suspended for no reason. Boring long story but, after about 6 months they re-instated them with nothing more than a "Whoops! We made a mistake".

What makes these 'summary executions' [I like that description!] infinitely more annoying is that there's no way to enter into any kind of a dialogue about it. If you receive an email from eBay, telling you you've been suspended, it'll come from a no-reply address and good luck actually finding any way to contact them through their website. It just sends you round and round in circles before eventually dumping you onto their 'Community' forum, which is basically just a load of other pissed off users, shouting into the void.

I know the old argument goes "Their playground. Their rules" and, in general, I agree with that. But, with these huge corporations which have a virtual monopoly on certain arenas of internet activity, there ought to be some safeguards in place to protect users against arbitrary [and often unfounded] account suspensions. This kind of thing could literally bankrupt someone's business, if they relied heavily on eBay sales.


Yeah... my eBay account is very old (maybe 1998 vintage?), and I almost never use it anymore.

But I have a fondness for out of print, obscure tabletop RPGs, and eBay is probably the only market I know of for that, outside of knowing a guy who knows a guy.

Losing access to eBay would be annoying. Not world-ending, because perspective. But annoying.


> until I uploaded a load of personal ID documents [passport / driving licence, etc] to confirm my identity.

I don't use anything that I'm totally dependant on, so this hasn't been a problem for me (getting an account closed - might have happened with Facebook, maybe), but your post made me think of what I'd do with such a request:

First, I'd say something like "Well, since you're asking for *very* personal and confidential info, first I will need you to confirm *your* identity by you sending me [unredacted ID card|License|Passport] as well as proof of employment such as [Complete unredacted paystub|Complete unredacted employment contract] to ensure you really are who you say you are before proceeding".

To which they would invariably reply "Well we can't do that because it would violate the privacy of our employees (oh, the irony!), but rest assured we will keep the info you provide strictly confidential, blah blah blah".

At that point I'd fire back "Seriously?!??" along with samples of past leaks/privacy violations from that company, along with a blurb about how I can't talk about this request anymore since I'm now in the process of forwarding this to my local Attorney General (or "on the advice of my council"), etc.


I also had a very old account, and sold things infrequently.

Went to sell something last year, and they immediately wanted a pile of personal information and bank access that I'm simply not going to give them or anyone like them.

And that's how I stopped using Ebay after 20 years. Not like there aren't other places to sell things.


This happened to me after I sold some AirPods. Not just with Buy It Now, but after I waited a week for the auction to end, and was literally about to post them in the mail. After being suspended I could no longer access the listing.

I managed to reach their customer support line and had the most arrogant agent I've ever had in my life. Like someone who genuinely felt like I was some kind of evil hacker, and actively got off on punishing me. It was disgusting.

FYI - I'm just some regular person who reads this website, and I honestly feel really weird actually being one of the people who posts replies. But reading this brought back such angry memories of that encounter that I felt compelled to actually create an account and share my experience.

In the end I switched to one of the much better app-based modern competitors that we have in the US (edit: it was Mercari) and never looked back. Too bad the rest of the world is still stuck on eBay.


Hope you'll edit and include the name of the app. If they've solved a problem for you then they deserve the mention!


Sure, that's fair. It was Mercari. Thank you Mercari!! I now use it for regular items, and Poshmark and Depop for clothes. No more broken web 2.0 app literally yelling at me that I hacked it.


Not the OP, but Mercari is a good one. (Maybe there are others?)


Yup, you guessed correctly!


> Count me added to the chorus of folks calling for regulations that will eliminate this sort of abusive behavior against consumers. We need some sort of 'due process' required of companies that operate above a certain scale.

If this is what you want, then you'll need to escalate your problem to regulatory authorities, even if doing so only means they become aware of the problem. I've posted links to forms that you can use to report issues like this to state-level and federal-level regulators here[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28176193


Thanks for this.

The first link led me to the State of California Department of Consumer Affairs. I filled out the form to file a complaint and got an error: "The requested URL was rejected. Please consult with your administrator. Your support ID is: 18093870959457122962". LOL it's dead ends all around. No one wants to hear from plebs.

I'm not giving up though. I'll go through your links and I'll figure out how to get through to someone. Might have to write a physical letter. :)


This happens for a few reasons.

1) Inactive or low activity account starts selling (instead of buying) high value / high risk items. Think GPU's, Macbooks, etc.

2) An old account has activity (including someone trying passwords from various breaches some of which might match an old salt). Because old account takeover and then fraudulent sales is a pretty big issue (old accounts often have 100% positive ratings) this seems to trigger the bots.

3) Accounts without KYC - normally you are asked to update.

I'm not sure how old accounts have to be to have problems. I'm from early 1999 which was three or four years after I think they got going.

The fraud problem was getting pretty ridiculous on ebay so kind of glad they are cracking down but it's got to be a pretty imperfect hammer and so no doubt lots of false positives.

I've gone to selling my old iphones / ipads etc back through apple. No where near the price you get elsewhere, but no hassle either from my experience.


This comports with my general understanding of the matter. By total coincidence, I just wrote a newsletter on this topic (like, minutes ago), and it includes a description of triangular fraud, which is particularly relevant for e.g. sales of desirable, fungible, high-ticket electronics via online platforms from accounts which don't have a long history of being electronics retailers.

https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/the-fraud-supply-chain/


Somebody probably hacked your account and listed a bunch of macbooks for sale. If you list a bunch of expensive stuff with little history of selling eBay will ban you. It also depends on the items "you" list, for some reason apple products turn the fraud score up to 11.


Good idea. I just checked and I don't see anything for sale or recently for sale. And I rotated my password for good measure. I can still login, I just can't buy or sell anything.

I got a flurry of what looked to me like phishing emails 'from eBay' right before my account was suspended...they claimed to cancel my bids on a bunch of old, long over auctions, with the call to action asking me to click on link with a URL referencing a local DLL.

So yah, something fishy is going on, but I can't help eBay figure it out if they just disable my account and make themselves unreachable. Is this what ghosting feels like?


>with the call to action asking me to click on link with a URL referencing a local DLL.

Are you talking about the urls that have "eBayISAPI.dll" in them? That's just how their urls are, not some sort of attempt to execute dlls on your computer.


My wife got kicked out of PayPal for no good reason 15 years ago. I think she could have reinstated it if she sent a fax but she wasn't about to send a fax.

If you want to know why people aren't adopting 2FA, it's because we know it's just a matter of time until the hole that attaches your Yubikey to your keyring wears away, your Yubikey disappears, and with customer service that amounts to "talk to the hand" at many sites, it's a digital death sentence.


Because of this, I make a point of having 3 2fa keys. A daily driver, a backup key on a key ring and the final one in a fireproof safe. Like you I would be afraid what would happen if I lacked my key.

Companies need to at least clarify “what happens if I don’t have my key” also one time codes are a thing that need to be saved and can help mitigate a hardware failure.


Great for you, but you have to realise that the average person can barely even remember a single password. That is not a solution suitable for mass adoption.


I would see Apple's recent addition of 2FA support to iCloud passwords would be a good (and maybe the only) 'average person solution'? MS Authenticator is also good as you can sync it and if you get a new phone you can get the same 2FA codes again


Amazing that in 2021 there are few better alternatives than have 3 x 2FA keys.


What would be that alternative?

The point of 2FA is "something you have"... if you lose it, you no longer have it. It's designed to lock you out if lost/stolen... otherwise, what would be the point?

As an aside, 2FA keys are not what most people use... they use cell phone numbers, time-based rolling-code authentication apps, email addresses, etc. It's your choice to use a physical key, even if it might technically be the most secure of the options.

Security is always a trade off with convenience.

GP seems to not understand the point of 2FA. If you can simply call up customer support and maneuver you way back into a locked account, then so can the "bad guys". Any information they have about you can be found by a determined attacker... hence, the "something you have" approach.


Ideally I'd like to be able to register my physical token with the manufacturer and have them send me a replacement based on sufficient identification. Things like ordering the replacement with a credit card in my name, sent to my mailing address, vouched for by a notary public, and/or anything else that I check off on the list of factors I find acceptable when I send them my registration form.

The alternative is for me to use TOTP and have the secrets printed out, lightly encrypted, and stored in a safe deposit box.


In order for this plan to work, the token manufacturer would have to be able to store your secrets, which means you uploading your secrets, which defeats the purpose of physical tokens. Just use a cell phone number one-time-code or authenticator app with time-based-codes instead.


You can enroll your phone and some laptops with most sites, so it's def getting better.


I wouldn't depend on long term data retention of flash memory. You should have a passphrase encrypted printout of the contents as well.


Why wasn't she about to send a fax?

I don't think wear-and-tear is why people aren't adopting them. I have a yubikey from Mt Gox (yeah, the btc one) that I've just left on my keychain all this time. My keychain is not treated gently, and it's been through the washing machine more than once... yet the hole is fine, and plugging it in now, it still functions and delivers its gibberish after a touch. I don't know what the expected lifetime should be.

I can't really speak to other people, but I personally avoid adopting 2FA because 1) most of my passwords are strong 2) it's not true 2FA, instead of yubikey it's some shitty SMS system or more uselessly a TOTP system whose key I can add to a bash script that'll use oathtool and xdotool to enter it for me with a hot key press 3) it's some shitty app that requires my online smartphone 4) I worry about the opposite case where services are so forgiving to restoring access that even if you have a brain aneurysm and forget the password and your yubikey bursts into flames they'll still let you in after a phone call -- if my account access can be socially engineered that way anyway, I don't want the additional annoyance of dealing with 2FA.


Yah, that sucks...losing access to PayPal can be really bad depending on your situation.

My brother got kicked off Facebook a couple weeks ago because his account was hacked and they couldn't decide who was legit and who wasn't, so they just threw up their hands and shut down his account. It hurt because he used Facebook a lot.

I agree that 2FA doesn't solve the problem of companies deciding not to invest in good, considerate, human, security conscious, customer support. More technology isn't always the right answer, especially when it comes to questions of companies harming and then dehumanizing their customers because it's cheaper than doing than the right thing.


On the flip side, if you're putting enough money through your account PayPal will give you a VIP account manager who will make sure everything is great and will go to any lengths to keep your account working for you, regardless of whatever the fuck it is you are selling. Even if you were running one of the world's largest TV show torrent sites. PayPal would ask for an account so they could look around and then they would be like "All good! Keep going!"


I got in trouble with PayPal in... Like... 2007 maybe, not entirely sure when. I remember that I never got an email about it, the account was just restricted one day when I logged on to make a purchase and they asked for A LOT of papers and faxes and scans to unlock it again. I never got an explanation for that but since then I never had a problem again.


I would really like to find a good alternative

Endless captchas, randomly asking to login again, holding payments, asking for more and more user data, now demands ID card picture and social security number for selling, dropping PayPal... After 10 years without problems, getting really tired the past 6 months


Mercari is a good platform (though it doesn't solve the Paypal issue - pretty every platform is moving to their own payment platform)


Unfortunately [UK member here] Mercari is US only. The only direct eBay alternative I'm aware of is eBid[0]. From time to time I check it out, when eBay is pissing me off more than usual. But it has always seemed like a ghost town.

Also, their financial model puts me off. They have no seller fees, but you have to buy seller membership [per week / month /year etc] to sell. Given the apparent lack of activity on the site and the chance that I'd get no buyer interest at all, that seems like a bit too much of a gamble to me.

[0] https://www.ebid.net/uk/


I've had success using OfferUp, though they do require personal information if you ship your items. Local transactions (Craigslist style) don't require it.

I deleted my eBay account after over a decade of use, when eBay switched from PayPal to managed payments (basically requiring social security number and bank account) -- I didn't trust eBay with my personal data after dealing with increasingly poor customer service.


Of course, the context here is that every additional security measure is because a scammer has already used that method to hijack accounts or perpetuate fraud... which means that every succesful company with a similar market will either eventually follow the same trajectory or see its support and verification costs balloon into total unprofitability.


Asking me to login multiple times a day will probably help people doing the hijacking

We are talking accounts with 10 year positive reviews, selling trinkets, being treated like a 0 reputation account selling the latest iPhone


Etsy has been moving into this space.


Update...got an email from eBay around 7p Pacific:

" Hello brokeninfinity, We're pleased to let you know that your account is reinstated.

If you had any listings that were removed when the account was suspended, we've restored those listings... "

Perhaps this discussion caught an eBay-er's attention, and if that was you, thank you for helping out. And thank you HN for helping call attention to my case.

That said, it shouldn't take this sort of attention for eBay to do the right thing. My point stands that eBay inappropriately suspending accounts without explanation or hope of appeal is not ok. And the email reinstating my account did not contain an apology or an explanation of what went wrong, so while I appreciate it, it's not enough. eBay needs to stop treating people this way.


Yes, eBay is atrocious. I was banned based on my IP, along with all my family's accounts a few days later.

It's an automated system. Customer support will say the equivalent of "it's a secret" why you were banned. Yeah right it's some dumb batch job.

Save yourself feeling abused. Don't bother trying to fix it. Waited 6 months and created a new account.

Another time I sold an item and shipped it. The froze my account. Same "it's a secret" bs. What did work for me was contacting the Better Business Bureau. That got me answers, months later. It was because I shipped the item before the Paypal payment had cleared.

eBay is a shitty company. To the extent this is the future of software, we a f-ed as we get older. These systems are going to chew us up and spit us out.


Same thing happened to me last year. Listed an item, it got pulled, almost identical message. Contacted support, account is banned from selling forever.

I’d had it since 1998.


Similar experience, replied elsewhere in the thread. I had some luck contacting the Better Business Bureau. eBay is a dumpster fire, better move is to never use them again and warn others against it.


What was the item?


It was an EVGA Nvidia GTX 1080.


I have had the exact same thing today. I got an email informing me my account has been permanently suspended. I haven't done anything wrong. I've managed to contact them a few times via email but get the exact same email reply each time. It sucks. If I'd done something wrong I'd understand, but nope. Unless buying a new phone case is a violation? I was looking for a solution and it brought me here. I hope you sort it out. Also, I made an account purely just to add a comment. Haha


Just a little update. I too got an email today from eBay saying my account has been reinstated. Just when I'd drafted a hefty email too. Oh well. I'm glad it's sorted but it's shocking how they get away with this.


Contact the Better Business Bureau. They will go to work for you on this maybe. eBay is a despicable company.


Ah I used them when my Activision account was hacked and I was banned. It worked.


My email client is also my RSS client. I just panicked a little bit.


It took me a moment to parse the headline on the HN front page, because there was no domain name but also no "Ask HN:" or similar.


I'll add to the chorus. Something like this happened to me recently.

I bought a heating element for my dishwasher on eBay. I received a non-genuine part, took photos, and requested a return. Next thing I know my 15-year-old account is banned. Maybe the seller reported me in retaliation? eBay's "support" AI sure isn't interested in telling me what happened.

I hate this world we've created, where you can get banned from services at random with no recourse and locked out for life by an AI. The same thing happened to my Discord account a few months ago too :(

It almost makes me want to start a meme Twitter account and build up a big follower count. That's apparently the only way to reach a human in customer support at a big tech company these days.


  >It almost makes me want to start a meme Twitter account and build up a big follower count. That's apparently the only way to reach a human in customer support at a big tech company these days...
Until your Twitter account gets randomly banned for no good reason.


There is such a thing for payment processors, which includes PayPal and maybe eBay; it's https://www.consumerfinance.gov/complaint/.


I had my brand new account banned today as well. How does one sell an iPhone on Ebay without being suspicious?


With a new account, you don't. Most buyers would run away from new accounts selling iPhones. Maybe eBay has institutionalized that running away.


Yeah that's fair, I'm facing the same thing with credit, since I just moved to the UK.


Buying and/or selling other items to build up your feedback first (My current account is 12 years old, and I have sold several iPhones there, 2 recently, with little issues, though you don't have to watch out for scam attempts)

Mercari is also a good platform to sell on.


I once ordered an LCD TV on eBay. After a few weeks a tiny box was delivered. I was lucky enough to be home at the time of delivery, so I rejected the package. I asked for a refund from the seller, which I received. From what I saw on comments on the seller's page, this had happened to a few other buyers, who were unlucky enough to open their tiny boxes, only to find ..excrement in them. There was no way for me to report this to eBay. Since I got a refund, there was no way to complain about it. eBay has become very hit-and-miss, and is probably not that great for used items anymore since you now have to pay taxes for them.


Rich, coming from the company (apparently with orders coming all the way from the CEO) that terrorized a journalist with shipments of cockroaches, a funeral wreath, a bloody pig mask, and who even traveled cross country to spy on their house.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/07/ebay-manager-imp...


Yeah, I don’t think people realize how totally messed up eBay had to have been for the CEO to be knowledgeable about the harassment of a couple over their email newsletter.

Ebay’s head of security was sentenced to two years. This was not very long ago.

That customer support “ain’t so great” is probably one of the lesser concerns for this organization.


I closed my eBay account after I saw what kinds of scams and misrepresentations they have been allowing in the GPU market. For example, people selling literal pictures of GPUs instead of the real thing, but putting it in the GPU category and listing for $1000+ dollars.

It’s almost as if they’ve given up on their whole mission of being a safe and reliable place to buy and sell goods online. After all, who actually wants to pay for moderators? Not them, clearly.


The same happened to me. Bought a few things over the span of a decade and a half, sold a few things. Never any problems or returns, on either side, all good reviews. After about 8-9 months of not using my account got the same summary execution with no recourse. I think I originally opened my account in like 99 or 00 such and had a nice short handle.. It pissed me off enough to never use eBay again.


Somehow tech companies have normalized "no recourse" decisions, as well as dark patterns (or straight up impossibility) to prevent actual interaction with a person to resolve your issue.

I agree with you that part of the anti-monopoly legislation updates that are needed for platform companies is mandated visibility of a way to contact a person to resolve issues, and fines for exceeding a response time (maybe 20 minutes). I'm a libertarian and normally oppose this kind of thing, but the obvious abuses from every big tech company are too big to ignore and are exactly the kind of thing where government regulation does make sense.


> Somehow tech companies have normalized "no recourse" decisions

Yep.

> I agree with you that part of the anti-monopoly legislation updates that are needed for platform companies is mandated visibility of a way to contact a person to resolve issues, and fines for exceeding a response time

This would solve several problems that exist. What if legally-mandated customer support came to, say, 30% of Google's operating costs? What if it was 80%? It's not obvious that banning no-recourse decisions is an improvement to the world.

> (maybe 20 minutes)

Well, no, that's ridiculous. Legally mandated 20-minute response times means legally-mandated no-recourse decisions. Only the computer can respond quickly enough to comply.


I definitely see your point. At the same time, I think a lot of "tech" has really derived value by circumventing regulation and norms - easy examples are Uber and Airbnb which seemed great and legitimately "disrupted" tired industries, but it turned out a lot of stuff in those industries was the way it was for a reason, and when companies mature and end up putting that stuff back, their competitive advantage evaporates. That could also be true for ecommerce (broadly defined) - if they can't viable run a business without having x% of customers get shafted because they have an issue where they can't even talk to a person, is that still OK? Maybe it is. Is it OK that a company is able to destroy any competition by not offering personal service, so the people it screws have nowhere else to go? I'm not sure. Maybe it's not 20 minutes (I picked that because I know that if the regs just required a phone number companies would have a 30 hour wait time, or an infinite one pretending you're almost there) but there needs to be some standard - or a credible threat of competition that isn't there with platforms


can report the same here. happening to tons and tons of people today, zero details in the email


Are you sure the email actually came from eBay? I get lots of emails about “my”eBay account that I don’t have.


The exact same thing thing happened to me last night. Account suspended with a perfect but low volume selling record. I haven't used it for a year.

Received an email this morning saying it has been reinstated. Either way it did make me waste my time removing my cards from PayPal and emptying that account. The reason I stopped using them is that they appeared to manually use the direct debit to take money from my account (and more than they should have) after I'd logically won against a fraudulent return according to their policies last year.

My last action was to make a SAR which showed again that it was closed against their policies.

Knowing eBay at first I thought they may have looked into the case and wanted to cover their backs. I wouldn't be too surprised now if it was just a bug.


I used to sell a lot on eBay a long time ago. 15-20 years ago maybe. Recently I login into my account again trying to sell something, was rejected because I sell in excess of $250.

Then I’m told to call the local customer service at working hours. Of course I need to go to work, so I find some time to make a call. Instead of anyway to get a human to answer, I’m told to input a code from my phone. Which the code wouldn’t show on mobile of course, you have to use the desktop version. Hadn’t cared enough to make a call since.

eBay is a dying company. They don’t give a fuck to individual sellers anymore, they try to adapt to the Amazon model. Except their website is very difficult to use, different components don’t even work together.


Reporting same here. 10+ year buyer only account with no selling activity and a perfect 100% feedback record. No clue why I got a “perma ban”. No recourse to contact the company. Messages VIA FB messenger were not answered.


I got it today as well. No idea what's up yet, something to do with one of the orders I cancelled recently? I spoke with the seller and we resolved the issue completely without issues. I use unique password for ebay.


I am a 22 year members 100% positive feedback on 442 purchased and don't see anything and I got the email today 12/3/21 @ 439 pm EST...with no instructions on why but the above generic message.


If you've logged in from the same computer to an account that was suspended, or share some of the same contact information, then that information can be used to link your legitimate account to a suspended account. The above email happened to me when my ex-girlfriend's mom got her account suspended. I had not talked to those people in a decade. I paid $400 or something along those lines to be able to talk to a live person as part of the eBay seller Anchor subscription to get my case reviewed immediately.


I had the same thing happen a few years ago with PayPal, it was completely out of the blue. I've been a user for over a decade.

There was no route of recourse I could follow, that was it, the end, done.

There was nothing out of the ordinary I was buying from eBay, I had a few subscriptions via PayPal, and didn't really sell things on eBay either.

I feel it was an algorithm fail, a bit of code that arbitrarily decides to delete you off the system.

Maybe something we can look forward to more of if we aren't careful?


SOLVED: This just happened to me earlier today and I just got it fixed. I think there is a glitch in the system. I got emails saying bids on items already paid for and received had been cancelled. Then I got the suspension email. I went to the help chat in top left of my ebay acct page and explained I have 100% positive reviews and have been a member for years without ever breaking a rule. They apologized and fixed it immediately.


Similar email today. They must be on a tear. Been using mine for years. I just logged I with a new device the day before. Makes me wonder.


> "permanently suspended"

Suspend: "to debar temporarily especially from a privilege, office, or function" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suspend

so... "permanently temporarily ceased".

The corp speak could not be thicker.


Not necessarily corp speak: permanently suspended means you cannot use their services but they will still process data about you ;)


It seems like the common thread is that all of the accounts being mysteriously banned are old, and KYC rules have changed. Is it possible that this (the "you're banned, make a new account" message) is just because it was too expensive to build a workflow for old accounts to enter updated info?


Thank luck you even got a Mail. I’ve put one(1) common used thing for sale on eBay with pictures I took myself and they just deleted the account with no explanation at all. Couldn’t contact support because they couldn’t find an account with my address.


Ebay flies under the radar for having some of the worst customer service of any company, tech or no. I got defrauded on their platform last year, they sided with the scammer and I closed my account I opened in 2001.


If Ebay has 2FA you should write in your post if you’ve been using 2FA.


I don't have 2FA enabled on my eBay account. I use a unique, complicated password though, and I don't see any suspicious activity on my account, though, apparently eBay saw something wrong. Unfortunately they won't tell me what's wrong, so I can't figure it out or help.

AFAIK eBay doesn't support WebAuthn. I got a set of 3 Yubikeys some months ago (1 for my laptop, 1 for my workstation, 1 for backup in my fire safe) and I wanted to protect my eBay account using them, but eBay only offers me options to add SMS or eBay's mobile app as 2nd factors.


They do support WebAuthn, but only on Windows. (It works perfectly fine on Linux if you spoof your user agent.)

Also note that the option is not under "2 step verification" but a separate "Security key sign in" section lower down, because their implementation is not really 2FA, it's just an additional login method (email + security key) and it doesn't disable regular email + password login.


Hey! Sorry to hear. At this point, eBay is no longer a tech company but a legacy service. I’m building https://limited.co, the next generation of peer-to-peer marketplaces, with auctions and more. We launched a few weeks ago into the mechanical keyboard space and will be expanding into all goods. Check us out!


Automated systems are really poor in managing edge cases.


> We need some sort of 'due process' required of companies that operate above a certain scale.

The GDPR is your friend.

It gives you the right to appeal against automated decision making. A human must look into and review the decision to suspend your account if you request it. The human must be easily contactable and able to make a decision based on the facts.

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/

Article 22: "The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her."


ebay answers the phone, call them. the "call me back" option works fine too.


Paypal doesn't, however. I wanted to switch bank accounts associated with PayPal and just... couldn't. That account is now dead, and I've switched to carrying a checkbook with me to settle up dinner with friends.


paypal also answers the phone for me; you need to set the phone call up from the web. the only time I call them is when I'm having a problem with ebay. So happy that I can use ebay without paypal now.


I tried that and got such a runaround that I gave up. They don't provide a sufficiently valuable service to be worth the effort.




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