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A Warning to All Sellers: How eBay’s Automated System Destroyed My Family's Accounts (and My Health)
Summary: mobilebe shared a distressing experience about eBay's automated systems wrongly linking their family's accounts to a fraudulent one, leading to an indefinite ban. Despite multiple attempts to resolve the issue through eBay's customer service, they encountered only scripted responses and contradictory explanations. mobilebe detailed the significant personal and health impacts of the ordeal and is considering taking the matter to the Financial Ombudsman Service and Information Commissioner's Office. *vyolla* suggested contacting eBay's CEO and retrieving all data held by eBay. red_magpie shared that this type of situation is common among sellers and expressed skepticism about eBay's willingness to lift the restriction.
Subject: A Warning to All Sellers: How eBay’s Automated System Destroyed My Family's Accounts (and My Health)
Hello eBay Community,
I am writing this out of sheer desperation. I want to share my story to warn honest sellers about what happens when eBay’s automated systems make a mistake, and how impossible it is to get a real human being to help you.
Recently, both my account and my wife’s account were permanently and indefinitely restricted from selling. We are an honest, hardworking family who has lived at our home in Birmingham continuously since 2010. We have never broken the rules.
When I reached out to find out why our household was banned, I was told that our accounts had been systemically linked to a suspended fraudulent account.
I must state this clearly: We have absolutely zero connection to this account. We do not know who this person is. We are the victims of a bad actor who has either compromised our network, fraudulently misused our physical address, or triggered a false algorithmic link without our knowledge.
Instead of investigating this identity fraud, eBay’s customer service threw me into an endless, insulting loop of automated scripts. Here is the nightmare I have dealt with from seven different agents over the past week:
Agent 1 had the audacity to tell me to use an eBay link to message the fraudster and ask them to fix their own account so mine could be unlinked.
Agent 2 sent me scripted links to counterfeit item policies, blindly branding my innocent family as counterfeiters.
Agent 3 admitted that eBay links accounts based on "financial information," but completely refused my plea to actually check the financial data.
Agent 4 didn't even read my complaint. They simply looked up the fraudster, proudly informed me the fraudster was already suspended, and closed my ticket.
Agent 5 literally instructed me to log into the fraudulent account to seek more information—an account I do not own and cannot access!
Agents 6 and 7 completely changed the story, claiming the suspension was now due to being a "below-standard seller" and having bad "business practices," directly contradicting the first five agents and refusing to provide the data behind their claims.
I have begged the Executive Escalations and Trust & Safety teams to just look at the hard evidence. I asked them to check the IP login history, the dispatch locations, and the bank/PayPal routing numbers for 'hold_me_now'. The data would instantly prove the money and the shipments never went through my family. I have offered to provide our passports, housing documents, and years of utility bills. They simply reply: "There is no appeal for this decision."
The human cost of this automated failure is devastating. I am a father of four children. My eldest is 17, and another is currently working incredibly hard on his BTEC Level 3 Higher Diploma. As a father, I am absolutely terrified that as my children reach adulthood, their digital footprints will be instantly blacklisted by eBay simply because they reside in our family home.
Furthermore, I am suffering from severe, documented health conditions, including diabetes, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, depression, anxiety, and central stress retinopathy. Waking up every single day to fight a broken machine over a crime my family did not commit is causing dangerous spikes in my stress levels and severely damaging my health.
We are innocent victims being punished for a stranger's crimes, and eBay refuses to allow a human to look at the financial mismatch. I am currently preparing to take this to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) under UK GDPR laws.
Has anyone else experienced this catastrophic failure of the automated linking system? How do you actually get a human investigator to look at the evidence?
Thank you for reading.
Khan
red_magpie
Mentor3 months agoWe often hear from sellers whose accounts have been permanently restricted for association with a restricted account. The problem is that as you don't know who the other user is, you can't assert that you have no association with them. It could have been anyone, even a friend or family member. The saddest case I remember was a business seller who lost his successful eBay business overnight by association with his own son, who was still living with them and had misused his own eBay account and been restricted. It seems to be just the association that counts, not necessarily imply any wrongdoing by the the innocent party.
Good luck with your efforts to persuade eBay to remove this restriction, but they have done nothing that you didn't give them the power to do in the user agreement. From what other other sellers have told us, eBay may not even be willing even to discuss the case.
*vyolla*
Mentor3 months agoSo sorry to hear this, awful situation to be in.
The Financial Ombudsman won't get involved in a suspension scenario. I'd Google the email address of the CEO and would contact them, and serve any notices to eBay UK's bricks and mortar address, which can be on the front page of their user agreement.
Request all data held on you too:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/help/account/requesting-personal-data/requesting-personal-data?id=5089&from=EBAY_AI&origin=EBAY_AI