Just remember eBay has almost no way to report scam listings, hacked seller accounts, obviously fraudulent buyers, etc. They don’t want to clean up their act. Caveat emptor.
EBay doesn't care about fraud unless they think you're going to file a charge back with your card issuer, then they're pretty quickto protect their bottom line.
I do know for a fact that eBay can kick a seller off very quickly though. I bought a NES shaped raspberry pi a few years back as a gift. The day I got the item, I went to leave the seller glowing feedback, only to find his account was axed (he included NES roms on the SD card).
I'm banned from eBay since about 2010. Sold a cellphone which my sister shipped without requiring signature, guy just said he never received it.
My sister was working at a Telco so we just confirmed that he had actually received it because he put a SIM card into it, proof and everything eBay didn't care.
I withdrew the money from my PayPal account before they could claw it back. PayPal still works for me but eBay is amazingly impressive at immediately banning any new account I tried created since then.
Private companies have no limits on using illegally obtained information. It's very common practice. You're thinking about governments and law enforcement agencies.
This is an interesting thought experiment. If the buyer acts as though they did not receive the phone, then on what basis can they complain if you look up metadata of an IMEI that they contend they never took possession of?
But when the lookup reveals that they did activate the device, now maybe you've inappropriately accessed someone else's PII and you did believe beforehand that the results would show that it was no longer registered to you.
when ebay was "invented", i remember reading articles talking about how amazing it was that it actually worked, total strangers would send each other goods and money across the internet.
the incredulity was that everybody imagined that there would be more scammers out there than honest people, but there weren't.
but what is ebay supposed to do about people who claim they sent things vs people who claim they didn't receive things?
Car (and other I assume) forums always were a magical place in this regard. You send a random person a PayPal, they send the part or piece. There were always a few people who got taken here and there but the self moderating and reputational aspects of a forum really kept things quite in check.
Accountability and reputation is the missing secret sauce in this world it seems.
There must be at least some minimal way scam listings are handled. I stumbled across an RTX 4090 going for $600 the other day (actual selling price is $1-2k), seller claiming to have 10+ of them with 90+ watchers/in cart, but no reputation. Account was gone the next morning.
Curiously on Mercari, which seems to be more pro-seller, I've seen some GPU listings with "this is a scam" type comments attached to them. Very different way of handling the transactions over there it seems.
Seller reputation is the only reason I still use eBay (when no other options are available). Even when I am desperate, a seller with fewer than 10-100 relevant positive reviews (depending on how expensive the item is) is a deal breaker.
Last year, I accidentally canceled a return request after realizing I was being scammed by the seller. eBay refused to refund my money because the request had been canceled, even though the return address provided by the seller was fake. I wrote letters to two state consumer protection agencies and that worked. I eventually got my money back.
how does a seller giving you a fake return address enable a scam? had they sent you something fake that you were trying to return, and they were keeping their "identity" a secret?
> The Steiners were harassed and threatened both online and physically in their home by deliveries of such things as a bloody pig mask, live cockroaches and spiders, a funeral wreath, and large orders of pizza.[5][1][6] Pornographic magazines with David Steiner’s name on them were sent to a neighbor’s house.
What alternatives are there to eBay? Craigslist seems sketchy and Amazon doesn't support the auction model as far as I'm aware. I want to use good alternatives and encourage my family, friends, and co-workers to do so as well. eBay seems unsalvageable and I think the best thing for us is for it to die due to economic starvation.
Two executives were recently imprisoned over harassing a journalist, to give you an idea of the corporate culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal