Tell HN: I was permanently banned from eBay in one hour

[bannedfromebay]

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.

[0x_rs]

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/

[grishka]

> 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.

[holoduke]

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.

[noobermin]

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.

[sam1r]

Thanks for posting this article. My mind is completely blown. I just have one question for those reading this.

>> so it’s possible that eBay has been scanning customers’ computers for almost seven years without too many people noticing.

Can't one check the archive.org for signup.ebay.com & verify this? Saying ebay has been port-scanning for 7 years and proving so, would be a much stronger point. Surprised the OP did not check.

[rdfi]

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.

[d1lanka]

Similar thing happened to me with Offerup - which is MILITANT about not using VPN's.

They banned me and no recourse/way to appeal.

I even sent them a physical letter without much luck.

Pitty, I loved the app, but stopped using it due to their unnecessary/strict no-VPN rule.

[catsarebetter]

This is why niche products and small businesses can succeed

[bvinc]

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.

[madrox]

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.

[dandanua]

> 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.

[protomyth]

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.

[yanderekko]

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.

[hdjjhhvvhga]

> 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.

[CamperBob2]

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'.

[srcreigh]

> If they were to give out their evidence, then their evidence collection methods would become known and would no longer be effective.

Doesn't this argument apply to the criminal justice system?

[xwdv]

I doubt this is the full story.

[IMSAI8080]

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]

And if you do get that somehow please post it, I think a lot of people would find it interesting

[steelframe]

The last time I tried to sell something on eBay, it was an RX 490 card. A buyer with an obviously fake profile pic clicked the "Buy It Now" button, and then shortly after I received a forged PayPal payment confirmation email with links to .ru domains. The shipping address was one of those international drop-shipping places in New Jersey (to get around the "only shipping to US addresses" restriction). So basically, total obvious scam.

I collected the evidence and submitted a report to eBay's fraud department. After the required waiting time I submitted a nonpayment report and got a credit on my eBay account about a week later. It took another 2 months to get a check because they told me that they were having operational issues because of the pandemic. A year later I checked to see if the scam account was still active, and sure enough it was.

Not sure how blatantly obvious scammers who get detailed reports of faudulent activity reported to eBay's fraud department manage to keep their accounts active, but it seems kind of impressive.

[______-_-______]

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.

[Nextgrid]

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.

[magicjosh]

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]

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.

[ComradePhil]

In my experience, Aliexpress takes claims seriously and is on the side of the customer.

[AussieWog93]

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.

[hansvm]

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).

[anon9001]

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.

[notatoad]

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. better to do that by initially limiting the scope of the marketplace to something small, rather than kicking people out based on some criteria.

[Blammar]

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.

[superkuh]

No. eBay is very friendly and integrated with the US feds. Any market competitor that did not provide such a friendly and long established relationship would be regulated out of existence when it started to become a viable alternative.

It's not a technical problem, it's a legal one.

[oehpr]

Because we have still not fixed "trust" on the internet. We're perpetually at the mercy of Sybil.

If you come to a small town and try and defraud the locals, you'll rapidly find yourself in jail, or worse. Small towns have local concepts of trust. Alice says you defrauded her, I trust Alice, that means I believe her. So I tell my friends, who trust me, and now we're coming for you. Just like that.

But online, there's no propagation of trust, I only have one source, and that's Ebay. Ebay's just not as good at trust as all of us working together.

So long as this dynamic is at play, as long as we can not propagate trust, then massive companies will dysfunctionally dominate.

[c1u31355]

Check out OpenBazaar, it's more or less the idea you're describing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBazaar

[the_cat_kittles]

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.

[photon-torpedo]

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).

[robbiep]

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

[mswen]

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.

[dehrmann]

> 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.

[notch656a]

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 "[email protected]" -- 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.

[robtaylor]

I had similar - been on there for 19 years buying and selling. Recently mainly buying (£x,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.

[tsak]

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 £100 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.

[nonrandomstring]

What the Dickens were you thinking even getting involved with E-Bay?

Aren't they the company who mailed a severed pigs head [1] and made death threats to people they don't like? [2] Did that story turn out to be bogus? Or do people have really short memories? Or are people afraid to even talk about it? Why is anyone even talking about them as if they were a legitimate company instead of a bunch of gangsters who have only escaped jail on some technicality?

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ebay-lawsuit-massachusetts-coup...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/07/lawsuit-ebay-tri...

[johnebgd]

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.

[pid-1]

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.

[logicalmonster]

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.

[mNovak]

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!

[bitL]

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...

[Terry_Roll]

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.