USA member here. After reading the
eBay Stealth eBook and lurking these threads for a while, it does not seem that it is possible to be 100% stealth if you live within the USA, because apparently Paypal now will eventually ask for your SSN or EIN number, which they use to run a credit check and identify you.
I can think of a few possible solutions to this problem.
1) Register the account outside of the USA. I am not sure if this is the best solution. For one, you'd have to worry about the IP address being able to determine your location with geolocation, which would show that you're in the USA. You could try spoofing your IP address. You could set up a
VPN server and only use eBay from that server, but I feel like that would be a major hassle and very costly and might not even work. You also might be able to use a proxy server, but I don't think they would work, since eBay can easily detect them. Spoofing your IP address also has a high margin for error. Another potential problem with this idea is how would you ship your items out? I personally really like the eBay/Paypal shipping-labels feature, which I'm not sure would be a possibility to use if your actual location is different from your stealth address.
2) Ask a friend or family member to use their SSN or register a business under them and use the EIN. I do not want to do this because I would really really rather not get anybody else involved. I would feel like I would be using them as a pawn, and that's not something I would do to a friend or family. If anything ever happened to the account, it would essentially ban them from ever being able to use eBay or Paypal themselves. I'd rather keep this just myself.
3) Just make the stealth account as usual inside the USA and wait for what happens when they ask for your SSN or EIN. Personally, I think this seems like a good option. It certainly seems like the solution with the least amount of headaches, but if/when they ask for your SSN, I have no idea how the best option would be to react. I would probably end up calling Paypal/eBay and explaining that I don't have a SSN and maybe make up some story about how my citizenship is awaiting confirmation (or whatever) and be friendly and polite as if I have nothing to hide, and see what happens. With eBay/Paypal being as irrational as they are, this could easily end up in the account being banned, which means you would have to start over.
I would really really like to be able to create stealth accounts at will and sell a large amount of items on them, with revenue of thousands and thousands of dollars, and be able to safely withdraw it to a bank account. This is what I used to be able to do on my legit account before it was banned. For this to happen with a stealth account, it seems to be the case that you need to "cook" accounts, meaning let them sit for a while as you build up trust with eBay and Paypal, so it would have to be a slow transition process. I don't mind playing the game, but I really have no idea how I would react to the SSN/EIN request.
The best way to learn anything is from personal experience, so I am going to create the accounts using all the new information I've learned and see what happens, and share my results, but I need more information before I just dive right into it.
Please provide your thoughts and ideas about what I just wrote. Thank you very much.