Your eBay account has been suspended

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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

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

eBay works well until something goes wrong, then it fails totally. The reason is that it is totally automated. When you received a “letter” like the one you got it is natural to assume that there is someone behind it who knows what they are doing. In fact it is a bot. You cant ask a bot “why” it did something. It doesn’t know. eBay is a much too early version of machine “intelligence”. In fact it is not intelligent at all. This makes life easy for thieves. The whole business model assumes that no one will ever have to be paid wages to sort things out. There is no budget to do so. The complaint process is just a bit of theatre to disguise the fact that you are being gaslighted.Time spent on getting a reply is time wasted. “They” don't care. In fact “they” don’t exist.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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...