One Year On

Unimatrix Zero · #1 07-24-2015

It saddens me to read all the hassle everyone is having with this so called ethical business and I do believe that there are certain European legal avenues that could be considered against this corrupt behemoth organisation as suggested to me by a legal associate. It’s just the time, cost and commitment in doing so…

Anyways, here’s my wonderful experience with them:

I had a 100% positive buying account for over 12 years (buyer only, never sold anything).

Back last year when the ebay security hacking news broke, a couple of weeks before this I suffered a sinister event with my account. My normal ID name suddenly changed to some random generated one which I had never seen before. I could still login OK and reported this to ebay as a security issue and the account was closed as a precaution. My Paypal account was not harmed and continues to be OK.

Ebay said that it was no problem for me to now simply create a new fresh account and continue buying as normal, which I did with no problems initially. However, a few weeks later, after a few successful biddings and buys, everything then began to go bad. I placed a bid and then received an email from ebay saying I was temporally suspended and asking me for identification verification, which I sent to them. This all went fine and my account was reactivated within an hour.

Then a week later the same thing happened again, with ebay suspending my account again and asking me for more identification verification. I sent more stuff to them, but on this occasion they said that they could not reactivate my account and that their discussion was final!

After chat sessions back and forth with no resolution I called them and asked them WTF was going on. Eventually ebay sent me an email stating the following:

“Your eBay account has been suspended indefinitely because you breached the terms of your reinstatement agreement. Because you continued to list potentially infringing items on eBay, we cannot permit further use of this account.”

I could not believe what I was reading as I had NEVER listed or sold an item on ebay and had only ever used ebay for buying! Obviously ebays internal data records and systems were very much hacked and breached, but in their eyes they were completely innocent and have a completely secure online business. Yea right…

It’s been a year since this happened and from what I can gather, I’m doomed forever for ebays own inability to securely run its own business. Nice…

Any advice would be very welcome

garry9061 · #2 08-01-2015

if you still want to buy on ebay and thats it just create a stealth account and buy a cheap PO box and have all your purchases go there

muzzie · #3 08-01-2015

Well, call them again and say that this is rubbish of them. Sometimes it works, they do lot of mistakes nowadays, and only several calls can sort this out.

Unimatrix Zero · #4 08-04-2015

Thanks for the feedback regards this issue.

A stealth account may be my only option as having had numerous phone conversations with them a year ago went nowhere. They just kept repeating the same script and hanging up the phone on me. What a lovely group of people this company employs...

I have considered calling them again after a year, but I'm terrified that they will initiate a vindictive witch hunt and begin banning any members of my immediate and distant family, believing that they are also a threat to the ebay community because they are associated with me!

This company has become a leviathan monster, being answerable to no one but itself, which is a very dangerous thing indeed. As long as it keeps making money for its shareholders, it will just carry on regardless.