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Insider Information on eBay Suspensions
 

Evidence eBay looks for when linking accounts:

These ones are pretty obvious that everyone knows/should know:

Cookies
all IPs (sign in, registration, listing, etc)
Phone #
Date of Birth
Name
Address/Zip code
Bank account / Credit Card (including names)
Shipping information (name/address/etc)


More interesting ones:

• Linked by PayPal address, including any addresses you put in your listing, what your account is linked to, etc.
• Linked by Picture hosting domain (has to be same subdomain too, ei flikr.com/userid/)
• Linked by email addresses. This means if any of your accounts have ever tried to change an email address to the same one. So if on your old account you once tried to change it to email@email.com, and then you tried to use that for a new account (successful or otherwise), it's linked.
• Similar auction format
• Similar items being sold or purchased
• Substantially similar feedback comments being left ie "Excellent product, fast service, very pleased" and "Great product, very fast, super happy". Those would be a strong link.
• Similar user IDs and/or email addresses. So like 'superfashions' and 'greatfashions' or 'toys1234' and 'toys4321', etc.
• Same pictures being used or watermark IDs.
• Registration or use vs suspension date. So if you were suspended on July 10 and created a new account on July 13. Or you started using an older (dormant) account right after you were suspended on your main account. We (eBay) usually look back 30 days for this, but some CSRs do it longer some do it shorter.

Those are all/most of the links eBay uses. They have to be used in various combinations with each other of course. One link isn't strong enough by itself. There is a department which handles high fraud suspensions which don't have to adhere to these proofs and can basically use whatever they want. But this dept. is reserved for high fraud accounts/accounts linked to them (by higher fraud I mean accounts with thousands/hundreds of thousands of feedback that may start or has started scamming people).

are they now checking the url in the description (image hosting)? or does that still only matter if it is the gallery image?

I've also been told by someone that used to work at eBay that they track it if you visit profiles. For example, if your seller names are "beach123" and "sun987" and you're logged into the beach123 account, checking the listings, refreshing a dozen times, etc. to see if they sold on that account already, it will also raise suspicion.

The url thing is the same subdomain (or whatever you call it) as an older account. So say you had a geocities account (substitute whatever it is you kids use these days) and you hosted images from there, it'd be a link. So say you used www.geocities.com/mysite/image1.jpg from an earlier account and it got suspended. So you created a new account and you used www.geocities.com/mysite/image2.jpg, well it's the same url just different pic, so you're screwed. But say you used www.geocities.com/diffsite/image1.jpg, then that can't link you (although if the pics are the same that's a different proof in itself).

thanks tcho.


you're starting to grow on me too.

Wow! Ebay, it seems, is quite aware of how seriously some people take it to go undetected, that they are creating more and more criteria to catch people.

It may very well be heading into the direction where all this and more maintenance (just to keep the undesirables out) will become too much of a chore, and they'll implement the kind of conditions that banks have, just to open an account, without actually having to comply with banking regulations. Because after all, suspensions have become quite routine in a way to increase their source of income.

adventmma, or eBay could actually use its feedback system to detect bad sellers like eBay was originally designed to do.