It's worse than that "Hi there! I am sorry to hear your account is suspended.Due to limited verification process here we aren't able to review suspended accounts.Our support always review all the details on the account before providing the final decision. I am sorry it was not appealed.~Olga"
I imagine if/when this story hits tech news outlets, someone in the eBay management chain will be regretting that response. No reply at all would genuinely be better for them than something so half-baked and kafkaesque.
I find it extremely strange that a company would encourage a credit card dispute. Wouldn't that affect the standing of eBay with credit card processors?
That's not how it works. Even the act of having a customer dispute you hurts you are a merchant, so it's better for the merchant to avoid them entirely.
Even if the customer withdraws the request, it still counts and you still have to pay the fee.
I'm sure eBay has better terms with looser thresholds, but even they are not impervious to the dispute system. At some point the networks can say "nah, we'd rather not deal with you" and there isn't much eBay could do about it.
Typically when you make a dispute the CC company reaches out to the vendor. The vendor can then make their case. Sounds like eBay was saying they wouldn't: they would just accept the loss. I believe they'd still be dinged though, as the first step of filing a dispute is "Yes, I have tried reaching out to the vendor first."
Still, how likely is it that someone in customer support (Kyla) would have any involvement in those in fraud/finance (who presumably would respond to the dispute)?
It sounds like an "unofficial" attempt to help, which can be disastrous. Kyla may KNOW that almost all credit card disputes go through because Ebay just eats them as the cost of business, but it may ALSO be the case that it could trigger something that makes them ban everything.
They will. I was defrauded for a few hundred bucks by credit card thieves acting as me on ebay. eBay has a legal department that will fight you to the end of the earth when you file a dispute against ebay. I would contest something and they would send 40+ file packets explaining why I was wrong. Even though it was lies it takes forever to painstakingly prove 40 pages of lies. Eventually the bank doesn't want to deal with it anymore, there's a committee that spends maybe 10 or 15 minutes on your case and it takes 400 pages of truth to disprove 40 pages of lies, and denies your dispute and you have to sue.
The best part is the pirates made the username 'piratearrgggghhhh@hotmail.com' or something to that effect as well as a tracking number for something shipped (to my city) an entire day before the purchase date and ebay included that in their discovery packet.... and ebay suspended the seller account for fraud .... I still lost lol.
Companies as large as eBay can make the credit card processor eat disputes as part of the agreement to use them (just like Costco is large enough to make Visa eat the entire credit card processing cost to have the Costco card).
I was the victim of credit card fraud and someone set up another ebay account under my name, which then "bought" items from yet a second fraudulent ebay seller as a way to collect the ill-gotten credit card funds. I disputed the fraud with my bank.
eBay fucking PILED and PILED on the paperwork to my bank, both at the initial and every appeals step I used to attempt to win the dispute. Fought them tooth and nail over a few hundred bucks. I ended up losing because they had a legal department going ham to make sure I would lose the credit card dispute where they had lawyers working 40+ hours a week vs whatever time I have on the side to fight a few hudred bucks. If you file a dispute with ebay it is like filing a dispute against an army of lawyers, good luck.
"Absorb" here doesn't mean "they won't fight it", it means they'll have a manageable chargeback rate that doesn't risk them getting cut off from credit card processing.
I had a case recently where a company recommended that I kick off a credit card dispute. But it was because the company was calling in the administrators, and therefore they wouldn't have any reputation or assets very soon anyway.
It seems possible that (since they've already reached the point of paying), the seller will go ahead and ship the order. Maybe the customer service rep (CSR) is just a very imprecise communicator and means to do the dispute if a problem does arise.
(Other signs that the CSR is an imprecise communicator: (1) they called the suspension "indefinite" at one point and "permanent" at another, but these are different things, and (2) they said "all" new members get suspended, but they may have meant this happens fairly often and is pretty routine.)
Another possibility is that the CSR simply didn't pay close attention and try to understand the situation. When the customer said they wanted to check the status, I think they meant it literally. They don't know that there's necessarily a problem yet, but they want to be able to check. The CSR may have concluded that the customer has an actual issue with never receiving the product.
Sometimes people are given a stupid script and have to say things like that. It's fun to try and get them to break character, harder on chat than on the phone. Or it could be a chatbot
I can't believe their words are written live, by humans. They must use decision support systems that provide them with text bricks, with "write custom answer" being one of the options.
My personal favourite is when you go to open a support chat and it makes you enter your issue into a text box. Then the chat starts, you repeat your issue to save time, and then regardless of the issue sitting on their screen twice, they ask what your issue is. I assume it’s either automatic or they’re penalized for not clicking the button that “says” it.
I always assumed so as well, but that kind of suggests they either intentionally misspelled "restriction" as "restruiction" to make it seem like you're actually talking to a human that is writing their responses, or they didn't, and nobody has ever noticed, or the tickets don't ever reach anyone who has the ability to fix the error.
I don't know. The replies are strange and sound like they're not written by a native speaker. If they had pre-selectable reply-blocks, wouldn't those be written by professionals?
I know a household brand who put up an ad on a freelancer site for $2 an hour for dev work. So there's that. On top of that, according to "The Design of Everyday Things" >>no one cares<< how things fail (e.g. copy of an error text or support message) so lesser functions, especially cost centers like support are almost always going to be off-shored.
That makes sense (well, not the $2/hr dev work), but even if you outsource the actual support, wouldn't you build the system they use?
Amazon's support that only barely understands me and sounds strange (feels like they do german <=> english translation both ways and theirs is worse than google translate) leaves a bad impression on me, so at least I care, but I'll happily admit that I'm both no one and also very much not the average customer.
Still, it just feels wrong. Granted, I've never run a support team, but I expect most of it to be repeated things. Someone's package hasn't arrived. It has arrived but was damaged. It wasn't damaged, but it contained the wrong product. Or the wrong amount of products. Or the product wasn't new. Or the product is broken, or is the wrong color etc etc. And there's not really a lot of variety in it. You find out the issue, you offer one or two solutions ("money back or resend item"), you tell the customer to have a nice day. Having pre-made blocks of well-written text to choose from (you can even have the agent choose in english and the customer gets the localized version) seems like a trivial thing, but it'll transform the customer experience from "okay, I guess Amazon only employs imbeciles" to "wow, what a nice person, and they were typing very quickly".
Large corporations are confusing to me. I'd expect someone at Amazon going "yeah, let's do that, it'll save millions and improve customer satisfaction, it's no-brainer". Yet they don't. And so I wonder: do they know something I don't ("we've tested this, people are more cooperative if the support agent is obviously non-native"), or are they just incompetent?
I visited a contact center for a major-ish online retailer once for work, and watched their processes. They had people dedicated to chat, who would operate 5 or more chats simultaneously, and in general were typing rather than copy/paste iirc. I'm sure it happens though, these guys I visited were pretty low tech.
It's often easy to see the copy paste variety happening though, e.g. in email discussions where you get sent some wall of text that's barely applicable to your situation. I've had this happen a lot with amazon and uber.
I don't mind the pre-programmed walls of text, but please don't make them too big. I got a wall of text answer out of Garmin--which promptly scrolled much of it off the screen. Unfortunately, what was left (in the window they constrained the size of!) was a coherent whole that was completely irrelevant. The relevant part had scrolled off fast enough I didn't realize there had been more.
(And I never did get anything useful out of their support, but they ended up fixing the bug.)
Yeah, it's a script. It sucks when the script is bad though. Like one time on the phone with some company I have a card with, I was asked for my "first and last name" when an agent picked up. I answered correctly and the agent shuddered like I said something wrong and was asked for my "first and last name" again. After a while I finally answered incorrectly and gave my name as it appears on my card (which includes a middle initial and suffix in addition to my "first and last name"). I explained to her the difference between what she asked for and what she really wanted, but she didn't seem to be happy with the feedback :(
The scripts are incredibly annoying. I would rather them just short-cut to "I cannot do anything useful for you at this point, and I cannot tell you anything that would help. There is no value in continuing this conversation."
Seems reasonable for certain non-native English speakers. "You are talking with a live support [person/agent]", but support is a noun meaning "support person". Chinese developers who have introduced themselves to me usually say, "Wu Chengming, develop" instead of "developerER". (The name is made up) Also, the strange construction using the indefinite article is a feature of some non-native English.
This doesn't mean it's not a bot of course (TechSupport Syndey seems likely to claim to be a live person), although I think a bot would tend to have more commonly used grammar.
In general, people who learn a language later in life are far more prone to errors where the language has two or more words that all map to one word in their native language.
Chinese does not modify words--thus things like develop vs developer are going to be a problem. Likewise, they only have gender on family and on written pronouns--thus the problem with Chinese speakers being bad at gender.
Is the world we want to live in really the one where pursuing support from a company requires the end user to perform a Turing test on their platform's support interface?
I have never been able to buy anything from eBay successfully, either it's fraud, or customs-postage get so fucking idiotic they demand more in fees than the cost of the item... never again, not like it ever worked for me
Those agreements usually permit the company to choose not to do business with you for any reason, including no reason. Usually that's fine since you can just use a competitor. But when a company has a significant market share and there are no realistically viable small business competitors, then consumers end up with no service for no reason. This is what I agree needs regulation.
> Those agreements usually permit the company to choose not to do business with you for any reason, including no reason.
At least for the linked article here the company isn't doing it for no reason, it's doing it for a libelous reason (calling the person a threat). Granted this libel is only published internally (pending a hack), so may not pass a legal threshold to be libel per se, but the actual reason for business termination may be arbitable.
And tracking exists for when a phone changes hands. We receive money by Zelle at times--and every established link blew up the day my account "changed" (T-Mobile/Sprint, there wasn't actually a change but it reported as such.) Why can't the other companies have access to something of the sort?
I've had my cell phone phone number for at least 15 years, maybe even 20. I wonder if I should just keep it forever even though it's from an area 2.5 hours from where I live. I think it's 2 area codes away. It also makes it easy to filter spam, I can either recognize the number (stored contact) or know it's a person actually for me (local area code) or it's spam (phone numbers area code).
at least in my experience in the USA area codes are now at most nostalgia, if not meaningless. They leak a bit of info about where you signed up, but I cannot think of a person who bothered to cycle their number to correct the area code.
Further, in civil arbitration you must pay the arbitration agent. If the other party fails to pay the agent, they report it to the court as failed arbitration and the case is dismissed. [ Harvard Law Review ]
In Germany E.g. arbitration for disputes with insurance companies is free and not organized by the company in their TOS but backed by the law, E.g. in insurance.
In the US, arbitration is purely a contractual matter between the parties. So, typically, companies (almost all of them these days, it seems) will require the use of arbitration instead of the courts. And they usually get to choose the arbitrator, who derives a great deal of income from that company.
There is a lot of economic incentive for arbitrators to find in favor of the company. There is very little economic incentive for them to find in favor of the person who has an issue with the company.
There's still frequent debate in the US as to whether companies can refuse to serve some customers on the basis of religion or sexual preference. So I would say there's a long wait before customers have universal decent rights.
If there were not monopolies this wouldn't be a problem. But another failure of some countries policies is in taking funding from companies and then making exceptions to let them grow into monopolies.
If you accept me as a customer, I agree to your ToS, I rely on your service in my day-to-day business, and you later hose me by banning my account for no reason, there needs to be a remedy.
Weird, does he say what the item was anywhere? I wonder if there are some things that are technically allowed but trigger fraud flags when newly created accounts buy them with certain payment providers. Either way, terrible customer service...
This is the most important question for me to try and understand this as well. It's a confusing piece of information to leave out, because if it's innocuous then not saying what it is is unnecessarily distracting, it it's plutonium, that might shed a different light on things
Would you make a Twitter thread about it if you had been trying something obviously illegal though? Wouldn't you just silently make a fist and say "damnit, they've crossed my plans again"?
Yeah this reads like when SaaS companies complain about getting banned from AWS and leave out the part where people were using the software to run massage parlors or whatever.
These "OMG I was banned for no reason" posts are ALWAYS very low on specific details because if the specific details were included it would be obvious why they were banned.
He does not and that's generally a huge red flag. So many times over the years I've dug into stories like this, and it turned out the person was trying to trade something very much not permitted by the ToS, and they knew it.
People who are challenging the ToS themselves are generally up front about what they are trying to trade, arguing that it ought to be allowed.
That said, this corporate approach of 'you are permabanned and we are not going to explain why because security' is just bullshit, essentially corporate dictatorship. Would you accept living in a country where you could be arrested, but all legal details would be withheld to prevent future crime? Of course not (I hope...though some would). The fact that this behavior has become standardized among tech companies is a major negative strike for the securocrat mindset and the prioritization of profit over anything resembling ethics. If you work for a company that has a policy like this, or uphold such policies, you are part of the problem.
In 2014 I purchased my first phone, via eBay. Its GPS unit was basically nonfunctional (twice I left it trying to get a fix in near-optimal conditions for more than half an hour, and the best it managed was observing two satellites), which was important for me at the time (I had resisted getting a phone for years and was only finally getting one because I was going to be out in unfamiliar wilds for a few weeks). I returned the phone. The seller denied receiving it. PayPal’s vaunted Buyer Protection rejected my claim. So I ended up $150 out of pocket.
(Yes, this is somewhat irrelevant here. But I haven’t ever grumbled about this incident and this brought it to mind, as another case of the powerlessness of the individual against a Machine.)
I’ve never had a failed return/refund which is the only reason I use eBay over Amazon or Walmart(Shopify). eBay will even refund return shipping from the seller’s account if you use the eBay return shipping label service. I don’t use eBay to sell anymore even though for electronics it used to be a really nice way to get some money back from older purchases.
If you returned it with a tracking number that showed it as delivered, it shouldn't have mattered if the seller denied receiving it. eBay basically always sides with the buyer in that case, that's their policy. And if they didn't, you should have been able to escalate by phone to get it fixed. (I've had to do that three times over many years, and ultimately got it fixed every time I showed the tracking number proof of delivery -- I'd had to phone because the scam seller had put a fake different tracking number.)
On the other hand, if you didn't use a service with a tracking number, or didn't put the tracking number into your return, then that was your mistake. Live and learn. :(
Or -- as happened to me recently with FedEx -- the shipping company simply lied about delivering the item, you're hosed.
It's extremely common for shipping companies to mark items as delivered when they put them on the truck rather than when they're actually delivered. I've been informed that items were "delivered" two days before the delivery happened before.
That used to happen to me frequently in the past with LaserShip, when Amazon used to use them in my neighborhood. The delivery drivers were frequently given too many items to realistically deliver (I assume), and around 8:30 pm if it wasn't delivered it would still be marked as delivered.
Then it would actually be delivered some time the next day or even the day after.
I always assumed LaserShip was being paid for on-time delivery so this would have been a policy passed down from management. Thankfully, Amazon finally rolled out its own Amazon delivery vans, and the service is now way better than anything even UPS, USPS, or FedEx has ever provided.
I love that you grudgingly admit your comment isn’t that relevant but let’s be honest it felt bloody good to get it off your chest didn’t it! Goddamn eBay.
Considering that eBay actually forbids sellers to sell the same unique item outside of eBay when it is listed on eBay then it is a very concerning behavior. In this case it looks to me that the person on the eBay side got somehow offended by the tone of replies and wanted to have revenge.
Where does eBay actually say that? I looked and couldn't find that. There are many people who crosslist with ebay and other sites. In fact, there are programs that help companies to crosspost in bulk.
Perhaps I have too strong interpretation and you can list it elsewhere but you are prohibited in any way indicate this possibility on the item page or during the communication between the seller and buyer.
I had something similar happen to my account as well. I can't bid in any auctions on eBay though I can do Buy It Now. The restriction came out of nowhere and has been on my account for years with no explanation.
Not mentioned here is that ebay processes making these decisions, including bots and support, may be using external signals to make these decisions.
Have you ever caused them trouble when using the PayPal account you connected to your eBay accounts? How about with any of any of eBay’s (many) subsidiaries?
Can your email or any other personal info provided to eBay be linked to risky activity (from their perspective) if eBay uses a service to analyze that risk?
This is not to say eBay is correct or justified in blocking your account. But just noting that it’s not as simple as: 1. makes account 2. Buy product 3. Banned. —
They have other signals available as well.
This is why it is infuriating. They have some model and some threshold. If an account goes over the threshold, they're banned.
For whatever reason, OP ends up over the threshold, and eBay is completely unwilling to put any customer service effort into reviewing whether they model may have misclassified OP's account. Having the service be completely off limits for a certain % of companies because it's too hard to assess errors is part of the business strategy, and it's an absolutely awful experience for the small number of people it affects.
Luckily, OP can probably live without eBay. Now imagine what happens in scenarios like these, which show up every few weeks on HN and other news media.
1. Sellers who make a living off sites like eBay who have their livelihood thrashed when model goes Beep on their account for some reason.
2. Businesses (and their customers) that rely upon cloud services that have their accounts closed indefinitely for unspecified reasons.
3. People locked out of their Gmail/similar accounts for unspecified reasons, who then lose access to every account tied to those accounts.
If you've ever been in one of these situations, it turns into a Kafkaesque dystopian runaround at best, and complete blackout at worst. I ended upon on the wrong end of an indefinite suspension from Google. I had to appeal a dozen times with no insight from them. I ultimately tracked it down to an off-by-one error on a payment card zip code. I had moved across town and my zipcode went up by one. Google didn't like that and I was a threat until I figured it out. Took months.
This is a good reminder for something that's been true about running a business, whether enormous or tiny, since forever:
If you are dependent on a single source for anything business-critical, your business is at risk. Period. This is why most companies go to great lengths to avoid that situation.
These "I got banned from X" stories happen so frequently, yet people still seem surprised when it happens. It should be obvious by now that you should not have your livelihood or business utterly dependent on a single point of failure cloud service, particularly one you don't have a formal business relationship with or any expectation of customer support. This goes for not only businesses but anything you deem valuable. Don't keep your only copy of X on a free cloud service. Don't host a critical E-mail account on a free, support-less mail provider. Don't rely on free social networking single sign-ons for access to other things you need. How many of these "I've been banned" incidents need to happen before people wise up?
And 'internal' signals that appear to be external - eg, ebay has a massive dataset of experience with your local delivery companies, and knows if they will be handling a lot of 'went missing in delivery' complaints from you.
I'm curious about the background here. It certainly seems bad, but I could imagine quite a few scenarios where this is expected. One would be making a second account to bid on your own item.
I want to make the point, I'm not accusing him. I just am curious about the background.
I think eBay has always been terrible. The website was awful and it went downhill fast after 2007 I think.
I still remember how I was able to include javascript and CSS that affected the whole page in 2005. Good times. I was using the former to enable Clippy in IE
It's not you, it's them. I've been 'indefinitely suspended' thrice from eBay. Whenever their extra secret suspension metrics DB gets an update, your suspension reasons are discarded, and you can appeal to reopen your business. I've found 'indefinitely' is about 4 years.
Interesting idea, if you're in the EU: when they ban you, ask them to delete your PII. Either you get unbanned because they're no longer storing the fact that they banned you, or they need to provide a reason for storing it against your expressed wishes. "We want to, lol" will probably not fly, so I expect they'd need to give some info on the reason of the ban. If it's law-related ("you're on a blacklist from the government, but we can't tell you"), you'll get a hint. If they just say "our magic ML blackbox predicted the probability of fraud was above average", I doubt that will be considered a valid reason. If they actually have a valid reason (e.g. someone with the same name already had an account at that address), you'd at least know what's up and can fight that head on.
I don't know though, maybe they'll just tell you to get lost and that they're not going to delete it and also not tell you why, and then just pay a $50 fine 5 years down the line when some data protection agency finds the time to do something.
Just FYI, I was in the same situation and did so and they never got back to me. GDPR enforcement is almost non-existent (especially in cases where they need to investigate and potentially litigate instead of sending canned replies) in my country (and most others by the looks of it) so there's nothing you can do in practice.
Sad to hear. It's annoying when you get a bunch of new regulation that is self-selected-enforcing and only the law-abiding citizens and companies will follow it while others ignore it without consequences.
It's spotty in Germany, since it's set up at the state level and depends on where the company is located. In my experience, Hamburg's DPO is terrible, slow and mostly unwilling. Berlin's is very slow but not incompetent. Hesse's is quick and responsive and feels like they have a good understanding of tech and want to get things done.
I've had an eBay account for over 20 years. I stopped using it a few years ago, then sometime in 2022 I decided to sell something, so I logged in and posted my item. The next day, eBay sent me an email saying that my account was suspended. I tried to login, and sure enough, locked out. I just left it alone; I was pretty much already done with eBay anyway. I did nothing. Well, out of curiosity, a few months later, I tried to login to my eBay account again, and it worked fine. I was able to list items for sale again. The message telling me that my account was suspended was still in my eBay Inbox, but I never received any sort of explanation. The whole experience was pretty lame.
My guess is that since the account was idle for a few years, then the account suddenly tried selling something, so the algorithms detected this as potential fraud. That sorta makes sense. My beef, really, is that the account was suspended with no explanation and no way to "unsuspend" it, but it "unsuspended" itself, like by magic. Weird.
Probably password dump and fraud attempt on eBay side. They aren’t going to explain that to hackers. I had the same thing and I managed to reactivate after I pinged support. It was rather painless than I was expecting. I don’t have a lot of love for eBay.
The idea of security through obscurity needs to die. I wish companies shared their logic behind these decisions. Sure bad people will take advantage of it in short-term. But, in long-term, most of the loopholes should be discovered and fixed.
Fraud is not a well-bounded problem like authentication. There is no cryptographic way to prevent fraud. Using behavioral analytics is about the best you can do from behind a keyboard, and if you share the way you're measuring it, people can change their behavior to work around it. One alternative is to put more onerous restrictions on users, so that it is hard or expensive for them to buy or sell on eBay, in which case people may just buy/sell elsewhere. The other alternative is to insert more humans into the process, at which point, you start to look less like an auction website and more like an auction house.
They prevent fraud through authentication. If authentication is unreliable then behavior matters. But behaviour is more easily gamed and abused and has more false negatives affecting customers.
The process of transacting physical items has many opportunities for fraud that isn't addressed even by perfect authentication in any way. This is where eBay's tough problems arise.
I don't think it's that. I think they don't explain, anyway, at all, for anything, simply because they don't; there's no motive to do so - it's just more work.
I had a similar experience when I changed my ISP. When I contacted Ebay they told me the only way to unsuspend my account was to click on the link they texted to me. I told them I don't own a cellphone and haven't for several years, so who did they text. I went through 6 different tech support people, and every single one told me to click on the link they texted, even though I started the conversation saying I don't own a cellphone.
You might think the stupidity stops there, but after all this frustration, I told them to delete my entire account, all my purchase history and reviews. They told me to do so they'd have to send me a text with a verification link! After 12 different techs couldn't figure out how to do so without a text verification, I finally threw in the towel.
Ironically, after a year I decided to try and log in again. Like magic, it just worked. What a shitshow...
The news says that TurkTelekom (home landline) now (2006) has SMS capabilities. Back then the company was only landline. There was no wireless landline. I think there is still no wireless landline. (Only few years ago Avea has merged with TurkTelekom and now TurkTelekom refers to both landline phones and one of 3 mobile service providers in Turkey)
Aroud 2006-2010 I was sending SMS from my mobile phone to my coisin's landline (yes, connected with a cord to the street) and because his phone didn't had SMS support a computerazied female voice would read the SMS for free. I think it is still valid.
I think you can search for dect phone with SMS support. I was thinking to buy one few years ago but they were a bit expensive.
Sometimes there is a service you can sign up for with a website to receive and send SMS from. Sometimes the phone company calls you and reads the text to you. Sometimes the phone company sends an email to the email account on file (this sometimes happens for wireless text messages too, if undeliverable by other means…)
The front line support people follow scripts. They don’t have any latitude to be creative to handle something unexpected like “client cannot receive text messages” or to answer any questions the the script did not anticipate.
Which means the only skill the front line support people bring to the table is translating what they are told into "goto script line X". We can't be very far from an AI doing that at least as well as a human can. If true we've seen the light at the end of the tunnel, and it's a train.
Then again, Google's "we will phone the restaurant to make a booking for you" portended that a long time ago, yet we aren't there. Maybe there's hope yet.
I had a similar experience with SMS dependent processes, only that time they also required access to an old credit card number I didn't have anymore, and that the credit card company couldn't provide because it was a temporary number.
Ebay isn't alone in relying on SMS. It drives me nuts and strikes me as irresponsible. There should always be multiple options and if they SMS something they should be able to call with a code over audio.
I assumed the same too, but there didn't seem to be any activity on the account and the password was just a randomly generated password. It never showed up on Have I Been Pwned.
Granted, still absolutely could have been a breach, but not like i can find out.
Similar story not with eBay but with Facebook. I've had eBay for around 25 years. Never a problem buying or selling.
I signed-in to enable 2FA, review privacy settings, change the password, and review whatever content was left.
Instalocked as soon as I reached the 2FA page.
Someone through channels unlocked it for me.
Tried to review the account again.
Again, same thing. Instaban.
Ban and unban processes are generally fully automated. The issue is with the signals used to reduce false positives and false negatives, and the ambiguousness of certain situations make judgement difficult-to-impossible without the critical thinking skills of humans. In general, the scaling of human review isn't economically-achievable. Maybe platforms should encourage review volunteers in some manner or seek scaling of human review by additional means.
Plot twist: I work for Meta. Linking the personal Facebook account with work was a required step. IG, nothing much changed, except it received a private "internal" badge.
"Once again this is Maria Kyla." - just in case anyone had any doubts. For some reason the mere tone of the support person's communication makes me think of chinese eBay/Ali-X retailers' made-up names used in support requests in order to appear more appealing and "familiar" to western customers. During my 7-8 years of buying stuff off of AliExpress I've been on the thankful receiving end of support from "Windy" (Wendy), "Marry" (Mary), "Magret" (Margaret) and "Amily" (Emily) to name just a few.
That's not the issue though, that's just a simple courtesy, would you be happier if they used their original name, perhaps in unreadable (to me) chinese characters?
Absurd statement in the context of chat/e-mail support. Of course you're not gonna get to see what the staff looks like. And no customer ever became happier nor felt more "connected" with the advent of first-name basis support staff in chat/e-mail instead of anonymous styled "you're talking with Support, how can I help you?", just like no customer is ever impressed with sales people gussying them up by repeating their name during conversation. It's just product packaging, not a support quality bump.
No, nor would I be sadder. Most of them do present their names in kanji, and it makes absolutely no difference at all to how the e-mail/chat support errand will progress.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] thread>>Take care bye
>>>I am sorry it was not appealed.~Olga
I love it, it's like a Monty Python Movie :)
Stripe's docs, for instance, mention this:
> Once a cardholder initiates a dispute, it is no longer possible to avoid the fee.
https://support.stripe.com/questions/dispute-fees-faq
Additionally, according to Stripe at least, these disputes will remain on your "record" with the particular network:
> All disputes, whether they’re won or lost, count towards your dispute rate, so the best strategy to avoid monitoring programs is dispute prevention.
https://stripe.com/docs/disputes/measuring
Even if the customer withdraws the request, it still counts and you still have to pay the fee.
I'm sure eBay has better terms with looser thresholds, but even they are not impervious to the dispute system. At some point the networks can say "nah, we'd rather not deal with you" and there isn't much eBay could do about it.
Kayla did say eBay would "accept" the dispute though, so maybe there's some sort of process that makes it a refund?
Still, how likely is it that someone in customer support (Kyla) would have any involvement in those in fraud/finance (who presumably would respond to the dispute)?
Think of the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R8GtrKtrZ4
They will. I was defrauded for a few hundred bucks by credit card thieves acting as me on ebay. eBay has a legal department that will fight you to the end of the earth when you file a dispute against ebay. I would contest something and they would send 40+ file packets explaining why I was wrong. Even though it was lies it takes forever to painstakingly prove 40 pages of lies. Eventually the bank doesn't want to deal with it anymore, there's a committee that spends maybe 10 or 15 minutes on your case and it takes 400 pages of truth to disprove 40 pages of lies, and denies your dispute and you have to sue.
The best part is the pirates made the username 'piratearrgggghhhh@hotmail.com' or something to that effect as well as a tracking number for something shipped (to my city) an entire day before the purchase date and ebay included that in their discovery packet.... and ebay suspended the seller account for fraud .... I still lost lol.
I was the victim of credit card fraud and someone set up another ebay account under my name, which then "bought" items from yet a second fraudulent ebay seller as a way to collect the ill-gotten credit card funds. I disputed the fraud with my bank.
eBay fucking PILED and PILED on the paperwork to my bank, both at the initial and every appeals step I used to attempt to win the dispute. Fought them tooth and nail over a few hundred bucks. I ended up losing because they had a legal department going ham to make sure I would lose the credit card dispute where they had lawyers working 40+ hours a week vs whatever time I have on the side to fight a few hudred bucks. If you file a dispute with ebay it is like filing a dispute against an army of lawyers, good luck.
(Other signs that the CSR is an imprecise communicator: (1) they called the suspension "indefinite" at one point and "permanent" at another, but these are different things, and (2) they said "all" new members get suspended, but they may have meant this happens fairly often and is pretty routine.)
Another possibility is that the CSR simply didn't pay close attention and try to understand the situation. When the customer said they wanted to check the status, I think they meant it literally. They don't know that there's necessarily a problem yet, but they want to be able to check. The CSR may have concluded that the customer has an actual issue with never receiving the product.
> Kyla: you are currently talking with a live support
That did not answer the question!
I don't know. The replies are strange and sound like they're not written by a native speaker. If they had pre-selectable reply-blocks, wouldn't those be written by professionals?
Amazon's support that only barely understands me and sounds strange (feels like they do german <=> english translation both ways and theirs is worse than google translate) leaves a bad impression on me, so at least I care, but I'll happily admit that I'm both no one and also very much not the average customer.
Still, it just feels wrong. Granted, I've never run a support team, but I expect most of it to be repeated things. Someone's package hasn't arrived. It has arrived but was damaged. It wasn't damaged, but it contained the wrong product. Or the wrong amount of products. Or the product wasn't new. Or the product is broken, or is the wrong color etc etc. And there's not really a lot of variety in it. You find out the issue, you offer one or two solutions ("money back or resend item"), you tell the customer to have a nice day. Having pre-made blocks of well-written text to choose from (you can even have the agent choose in english and the customer gets the localized version) seems like a trivial thing, but it'll transform the customer experience from "okay, I guess Amazon only employs imbeciles" to "wow, what a nice person, and they were typing very quickly".
Large corporations are confusing to me. I'd expect someone at Amazon going "yeah, let's do that, it'll save millions and improve customer satisfaction, it's no-brainer". Yet they don't. And so I wonder: do they know something I don't ("we've tested this, people are more cooperative if the support agent is obviously non-native"), or are they just incompetent?
It's often easy to see the copy paste variety happening though, e.g. in email discussions where you get sent some wall of text that's barely applicable to your situation. I've had this happen a lot with amazon and uber.
(And I never did get anything useful out of their support, but they ended up fixing the bug.)
Sometimes even people without scripts are merely trained on a handful of expressions, and they just rotate through them.
This doesn't mean it's not a bot of course (TechSupport Syndey seems likely to claim to be a live person), although I think a bot would tend to have more commonly used grammar.
Chinese does not modify words--thus things like develop vs developer are going to be a problem. Likewise, they only have gender on family and on written pronouns--thus the problem with Chinese speakers being bad at gender.
I have never been able to buy anything from eBay successfully, either it's fraud, or customs-postage get so fucking idiotic they demand more in fees than the cost of the item... never again, not like it ever worked for me
Still a good deal, but that was pretty silly.
We need some external arbitration if the company has a defining market share. Hope the EU tackles this next.
At least for the linked article here the company isn't doing it for no reason, it's doing it for a libelous reason (calling the person a threat). Granted this libel is only published internally (pending a hack), so may not pass a legal threshold to be libel per se, but the actual reason for business termination may be arbitable.
Edit: as a commenter downthread reminded me, I forgot to add "in the US" to this comment.
There is a lot of economic incentive for arbitrators to find in favor of the company. There is very little economic incentive for them to find in favor of the person who has an issue with the company.
If there were not monopolies this wouldn't be a problem. But another failure of some countries policies is in taking funding from companies and then making exceptions to let them grow into monopolies.
If you accept me as a customer, I agree to your ToS, I rely on your service in my day-to-day business, and you later hose me by banning my account for no reason, there needs to be a remedy.
Definitely, if I had been suspended and my only transaction was buying, say, a calculator. I'd probably be asking "Why are calculators disallowed?"
If I was buying plutonium, I'd leave that detail omitted.
In any sort of 'case' like this, it's very important to have all the facts, and refrain from jumping to conclusions.
People are very quick to jump on the outrage bandwagon.
People who are challenging the ToS themselves are generally up front about what they are trying to trade, arguing that it ought to be allowed.
That said, this corporate approach of 'you are permabanned and we are not going to explain why because security' is just bullshit, essentially corporate dictatorship. Would you accept living in a country where you could be arrested, but all legal details would be withheld to prevent future crime? Of course not (I hope...though some would). The fact that this behavior has become standardized among tech companies is a major negative strike for the securocrat mindset and the prioritization of profit over anything resembling ethics. If you work for a company that has a policy like this, or uphold such policies, you are part of the problem.
(Yes, this is somewhat irrelevant here. But I haven’t ever grumbled about this incident and this brought it to mind, as another case of the powerlessness of the individual against a Machine.)
On the other hand, if you didn't use a service with a tracking number, or didn't put the tracking number into your return, then that was your mistake. Live and learn. :(
It's extremely common for shipping companies to mark items as delivered when they put them on the truck rather than when they're actually delivered. I've been informed that items were "delivered" two days before the delivery happened before.
Then it would actually be delivered some time the next day or even the day after.
I always assumed LaserShip was being paid for on-time delivery so this would have been a policy passed down from management. Thankfully, Amazon finally rolled out its own Amazon delivery vans, and the service is now way better than anything even UPS, USPS, or FedEx has ever provided.
After 2m. Lol.
Why ask those questions if they have no bearing on the result?
Have you ever caused them trouble when using the PayPal account you connected to your eBay accounts? How about with any of any of eBay’s (many) subsidiaries?
Can your email or any other personal info provided to eBay be linked to risky activity (from their perspective) if eBay uses a service to analyze that risk?
This is not to say eBay is correct or justified in blocking your account. But just noting that it’s not as simple as: 1. makes account 2. Buy product 3. Banned. — They have other signals available as well.
This is why it is infuriating. They have some model and some threshold. If an account goes over the threshold, they're banned.
For whatever reason, OP ends up over the threshold, and eBay is completely unwilling to put any customer service effort into reviewing whether they model may have misclassified OP's account. Having the service be completely off limits for a certain % of companies because it's too hard to assess errors is part of the business strategy, and it's an absolutely awful experience for the small number of people it affects.
Luckily, OP can probably live without eBay. Now imagine what happens in scenarios like these, which show up every few weeks on HN and other news media.
1. Sellers who make a living off sites like eBay who have their livelihood thrashed when model goes Beep on their account for some reason.
2. Businesses (and their customers) that rely upon cloud services that have their accounts closed indefinitely for unspecified reasons.
3. People locked out of their Gmail/similar accounts for unspecified reasons, who then lose access to every account tied to those accounts.
If you've ever been in one of these situations, it turns into a Kafkaesque dystopian runaround at best, and complete blackout at worst. I ended upon on the wrong end of an indefinite suspension from Google. I had to appeal a dozen times with no insight from them. I ultimately tracked it down to an off-by-one error on a payment card zip code. I had moved across town and my zipcode went up by one. Google didn't like that and I was a threat until I figured it out. Took months.
If you are dependent on a single source for anything business-critical, your business is at risk. Period. This is why most companies go to great lengths to avoid that situation.
I want to make the point, I'm not accusing him. I just am curious about the background.
I used to sell there, but it's just so hostile now, to both buyers and sellers. Particularly sellers, though.
I still remember how I was able to include javascript and CSS that affected the whole page in 2005. Good times. I was using the former to enable Clippy in IE
I think it was always a pretty shit website, but now the policies have caught up.
They're like a governmental beauracracy now.
I don't know though, maybe they'll just tell you to get lost and that they're not going to delete it and also not tell you why, and then just pay a $50 fine 5 years down the line when some data protection agency finds the time to do something.
It's spotty in Germany, since it's set up at the state level and depends on where the company is located. In my experience, Hamburg's DPO is terrible, slow and mostly unwilling. Berlin's is very slow but not incompetent. Hesse's is quick and responsive and feels like they have a good understanding of tech and want to get things done.
My guess is that since the account was idle for a few years, then the account suddenly tried selling something, so the algorithms detected this as potential fraud. That sorta makes sense. My beef, really, is that the account was suspended with no explanation and no way to "unsuspend" it, but it "unsuspended" itself, like by magic. Weird.
The idea of security through obscurity needs to die. I wish companies shared their logic behind these decisions. Sure bad people will take advantage of it in short-term. But, in long-term, most of the loopholes should be discovered and fixed.
So then send a confirmation email when logging in after a while. If the email is also compromised, it's not eBay's problem.
You might think the stupidity stops there, but after all this frustration, I told them to delete my entire account, all my purchase history and reviews. They told me to do so they'd have to send me a text with a verification link! After 12 different techs couldn't figure out how to do so without a text verification, I finally threw in the towel.
Ironically, after a year I decided to try and log in again. Like magic, it just worked. What a shitshow...
Verizon, the ILEC where I am, provides a text-to-voice service if you pay for it. Basically converts an SMS to voicemail.
I guess IP phones can do SMS though.
https://www.onedirect.de/gigaset-e720-eu-version
https://www.quora.com/Why-was-SMS-text-messaging-never-rolle...
The news says that TurkTelekom (home landline) now (2006) has SMS capabilities. Back then the company was only landline. There was no wireless landline. I think there is still no wireless landline. (Only few years ago Avea has merged with TurkTelekom and now TurkTelekom refers to both landline phones and one of 3 mobile service providers in Turkey)
Aroud 2006-2010 I was sending SMS from my mobile phone to my coisin's landline (yes, connected with a cord to the street) and because his phone didn't had SMS support a computerazied female voice would read the SMS for free. I think it is still valid.
I think you can search for dect phone with SMS support. I was thinking to buy one few years ago but they were a bit expensive.
Then again, Google's "we will phone the restaurant to make a booking for you" portended that a long time ago, yet we aren't there. Maybe there's hope yet.
Ebay isn't alone in relying on SMS. It drives me nuts and strikes me as irresponsible. There should always be multiple options and if they SMS something they should be able to call with a code over audio.
No notice that I ever saw , but like you I really didn’t care/ was done with eBay.
Granted, still absolutely could have been a breach, but not like i can find out.
I signed-in to enable 2FA, review privacy settings, change the password, and review whatever content was left.
Instalocked as soon as I reached the 2FA page.
Someone through channels unlocked it for me.
Tried to review the account again.
Again, same thing. Instaban.
Ban and unban processes are generally fully automated. The issue is with the signals used to reduce false positives and false negatives, and the ambiguousness of certain situations make judgement difficult-to-impossible without the critical thinking skills of humans. In general, the scaling of human review isn't economically-achievable. Maybe platforms should encourage review volunteers in some manner or seek scaling of human review by additional means.
Plot twist: I work for Meta. Linking the personal Facebook account with work was a required step. IG, nothing much changed, except it received a private "internal" badge.
but it did look like someone touched their yubikey by accident.