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.
0. https://blog.nem.ec/2020/05/24/ebay-port-scanning/
Here's a handy list of valid uses for IP addresses:
1. Packet routing.
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edit: typo corrected, thanks.
I don't think I fully appreciate the assignments to read Kafka in college until these algorithmic bans, ousting from app stores, automated support, etc came along. Before that I figured the human element could, in most cases even if it required extreme difficulty, sort things out eventually. Then came these heuristic algorithms that have practically become the platonic ideal if Kafka-esque systems.
Edit: While Amazon is very far from perfect and has dropped several notches in customer service, I will say that they are still very good compared to others. I can still get ahold of a real person that has some leeway for professional judgement when addressing a problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnbDNv3uAl0
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJYaXy5mmA8
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On the consumer side it would be hard to market the advantage though because everyone thinks it won't won't happen to them (and as long as they are average enough, it probably won't), and the cost of being banned from eBay is not that big if you're just a casual user.
>> 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.
I was banned the same way as the OP, few months ago. They(humans)collected my Id, bank details, personal address, original invoice of the items I was selling, some calls, to finally ban my 15+ year user.
In effect, it lets you revoke your consent for the company to store and process your data. But it also provides for cases where your data can be processed without your consent. It's not an unlimited carte blanche, but fraud prevention is explicitly given as an example of a legitimate purpose.
At the very least, I'm sure eBay lawyers would be happy to argue the point.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...
Mind you, there's nothing to stop eBay from having someone now look at your data and go 'nope'.
GDPR specifically carves out keeping data for "legitimate business needs" including fraud prevention and so on. Whatever data Ebay (thinks it) has about this person that they are using to enforce the ban would be data that they would argue falls under this clause.
You might have a chance to successfully challenge the termination by legal means, if you actually did not violate Ebay's terms and conditions.
In this context the more relevant aspect of GDPR, which I think receives too little attention and more so enforcement, is article 22 (Automated individual decision-making, including profiling)
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.
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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.
I realize it’s not entirely the same thing, but it’s also not entirely different.
That exists and it’s just as prone to abuse as you think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial
However when a monopoly starts to take over, what is a private entity starts to have governmental powers.
In the US, there has been a century long politics effort to reduce anti-monopoly protections, to the point that the standard is now "are consumers being actively harmed in pricing" and what you experience would likely never be considered something that could now result in anti-monopoly action.
And without those anti-monopoly protections, eBay gets to collect economic rents—pure economic waste that profits eBay and hurts everyone else.
We need a return to Georgism to help fight some really bad politics that have developed over the past century.
To live up to that statement, society pays. Through the nose - letting criminals walk free is annoying, we do pay the cost of trying to find them, and we pay a large cost gathering evidence to make it stick in court even when e.g. the cops are 80% sure. Courts are very expensive; judges have a salary. As a society we pay this, because, well, take the frustration of OP and now imagine the penalty is not 'banned from ebay', it's 'in jail for life' or even just 'most employers will no longer employ you because criminal record'.
eBay could choose to pay these costs. It will mean:
* Paying for a tribunal of sorts, paying to have them set up procedures and checking that they live up to them.
* Accepting that most fraudsters will just go 'free'.
* Accepting that fraudsters who do get 'caught', still spend a lot of time 'free' whilst the laborious process runs its course.
* To manage fraudsters, rules are created and publicised which interfere with legitimate business to some extent; everybody on the platform will have to deal with the fact they can no longer do this. (Laws that oversimplify - in society parlance: Walking through a red light even when there are clearly no cars at all is still illegal; that anybody can clearly see it was safe to do this doesn't change either the fact that you could be ticketed for this offense, or that police should just arbitrarily let this go).
In this case, 'society' becomes 'ebay users'. Do ebay users want to carry the burden of this cost? In any case, ebay users carry the burden of paying for the salaries of eBay's board which may well be excessive.
Why isn't there an ebay alternative? One that is more expensive for buyers and sellers but has all this? In large part, network effect makes it infeasible to have many ebay-esques out there. None of them would be any good at that point, and/or you get services that make it easy to post to all of them.
Imagine if our justice system had to operate at a profit.
eBay isn't operating as a democratically endowed, taxpayer-funded operation for the public commonwealth. They're just a company trying to make a buck. It turns out, if you want to make a buck by providing market-making services to third parties, you become a huge magnet for scams and fraud. And you need to deal with that. This is how it works.
If you really got what you seem to want, it would be a government-regulated online market. And... let's be honest, that would probably be much worse for the buyers (who are the targets of fraud, remember) than eBay ever has been.
It is absolutely the same thing.
Except instead of saying "Access Denied" which immediately makes you suspicious and comment on the internet, they construct an alternative evidence chain so you waste your effort defending against the wrong thing, and the true techniques never come into question.
And where I am in Illinois, until a couple of years ago, if you were held in a county jail awaiting trial you were prohibited by law from having a copy of any of the evidence against you.
eBay does not have a monopoly on violence.
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.
Ofcourse it does, a corporation is a totalitarian organisation by design - I don't understand why anyone is surprised to learn this. Any disobedience or herecy and you are removed with prejudice.
Anti-fraud is basically all smoke and mirrors; if you reveal the methods it doesn't work any more.
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.
> Yep. OP's only real recourse is to just try again in 6 months or a year or whatever and hope that their ML algorithm evaluates their data differently.
And what change their identity? They already have their PII and banned them for life.
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.
At least in your IG example the ban is finite. I don't want the law to be used so bluntly but I'd really prefer if all bans had to be time limited, even if only technically where due to exponential scaling for repeat offenses the time exceeds expected human lifespans.
It would be far more helpful to spammers, who could then set all their bots to send threshold - 1 likes and invitations than the average user who rarely ever considers liking enough stuff to trigger it (and is able to take the hint and just not like stuff as much if they do get a warning). Plus in practice it's probably not just a simple threshold, but a function weighted by timing and topics and relatedness of accounts and which is completely unintelligible to the average person (but potentially informative to more advanced spambot developers).
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Doesn't this argument apply to the criminal justice system?
1) It's a private company, they can refuse service to anyone for any reason - this is spelled out in the TOS:
> If we believe you are abusing eBay and/or our Services in any way, we may, in our sole discretion and without limiting other remedies, limit, suspend, or terminate your user account(s) and access to our Services, delay or remove hosted content, remove any special status associated with your account(s), remove, not display, and/or demote listings, reduce or eliminate any discounts, and take technical and/or legal steps to prevent you from using our Services.
> Additionally, we reserve the right to refuse, modify, or terminate all or part of our Services to anyone for any reason at our discretion.
2) There is a mandatory arbitration clause in the TOS so you can't take them to court.
> You and eBay each agree that any and all disputes or claims that have arisen, or may arise, between you and eBay (or any related third parties) that relate in any way to or arise out of this or previous versions of the User Agreement, your use of or access to our Services, the actions of eBay or its agents, or any products or services sold, offered, or purchased through our Services shall be resolved exclusively through final and binding arbitration, rather than in court.
I don't like it but that's how it is. For some reason no one - right, left or center - seems interested in regulating these things.
https://ico.org.uk/your-data-matters/your-right-to-get-copie...
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 have no idea where to go next time I need something. AliExpress would probably be even worse when it comes to counterfeits.
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.
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.
Maybe you should read the rules for the service you are using?
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.
eBay and Amazon Marketplace put the burden of proof of delivery on the seller instead of the buyer when the shipment is not protected with signature confirmation. Many AliExpress-style items are also listed on eBay and Amazon at similar prices, and I've mostly switched over after my bad experiences with AliExpress. AliExpress still has a different selection of items, so I haven't stopped using it completely.
E.g. I had obviously fake EEPROM chips delivered, they weren't even new (they contained data from the previous use!). I have opened a dispute, posted the evidence that the chips are relabeled fakes - and promptly got it rejected both first time and on appeal. The grunt handling it had absolutely no idea what my complaint was about, I have received my goods, so what more do I want?
Fortunately it was only a few euros worth so not big deal - I have opened the dispute mostly to point out that the seller is a fraudster, not to recover my 15€ or so back. Tough luck ...
Over the years I had more luck sorting complaints out on AliExpress directly with the sellers because they are afraid of losing their ratings and thus a large portion of business (people usually sort by price and then by ratings). The support staff is hopeless in these cases.
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).
The first time eBay flagged it automatically and reversed the sale, the second I cancelled as buyer request since they told me they couldn’t pay.
The annoying thing is I had to manually restart the listing and ask eBay to override the selling cap so I could do so. It’s really annoying because they tie up the listing while waiting to see if you are that gullible or not.
My girlfriend got scammed out of over $1000 on Ebay recently (seller is within the country). Here was the dastardly scam: she ordered something, and the seller never sent it. Ebay would do nothing; the police would do nothing.
Why can you just take people's money like this?
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.
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.
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.
Scammers are already tricking PayPal's dispute system by sending real tracking numbers and sometimes even real packages but filled with bricks or other junk.
Imagine a situation where the buyer is malicious and claims they have received a brick. If you settle in favour of the buyer, sellers lose out, but if you settle in favour of the seller, buyers would lose out from scam sellers sending bricks instead of the promised goods.
A neutral party such as the shipping courier would have to act as a witness and unpack the goods on delivery to mitigate that, and even then it's not bulletproof if the goods have a defect that isn't immediately obvious.
It's not a technical problem, it's a legal one.
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.
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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
IMO, they're alts from other users that are trying to sell a similar item. I genuinely can't think of any other reason why this would be so widespread.