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I've been scammed and Ebay won't help. What to do?
Summary: lipouk49 expressed frustration about being scammed and facing challenges with eBay's support in resolving the issue. jckl1957 responded but did not provide any content in their reply.
Hi all, I could really use some advice because I’m going in circles with eBay support.
Back in January I bought an iPhone 17 Pro 256GB on eBay for £851.25 plus shipping. It arrived fine, activated fine, and worked normally for around 2 or 3 months.
Then out of nowhere it became blocked, I couldn’t make calls anymore, and the eSIM stopped working.
I took it to Apple at Brent Cross, and they gave me a written service record saying that the IMEI appears in a national database of property reported as missing, and because of that they cannot accept it for service or trade-in.
I also paid for a CheckMend report.
That report says:
Ever Blocked: The device has been reported lost or stolen in the past to a phone network.
Currently Blocked: The device has been reported lost or stolen to a phone network and will not function on some networks.
In addition to that, it also state in red:
"The legal title of an item matching your search term and category is in doubt. We recommend you do NOT purchase. You may provide
this certificate to any seller and suggest they email support@checkmend.com if they want to dispute this status."
The really frustrating part is that I already sent all of this to eBay. I spoke to several representatives, and at one point I was told a manual refund had been filed and that I should receive a full refund within 7 to 10 business days.
Now I’ve had another message from eBay saying my CheckMend report is not valid because the Stolen section is green, even though the Currently Blocked section clearly says the phone has been reported lost or stolen to a network and won’t work properly.
So I’m now stuck in this weird situation where Apple is refusing the phone, CheckMend says it’s blocked, but eBay seems to be focusing on one green field and ignoring the rest.
Has anyone here dealt with something similar?
Especially a case where:
- the phone worked at first
- then got blocked a couple of months later
- Apple confirmed the IMEI is flagged
- but eBay still pushed back because of how CheckMend labels it
I’d really appreciate any advice on what to say to eBay next, or whether there’s a better route to escalate this.
jckl1957
·5 months agoEbay won't help you outside of the terms of the Money Back Guarantee which gives you 30 days only to start a return case.
Customer services should not have told you that your payment would be refunded and you cannot escalate this matter without an open return case.
Have you been in touch with the seller?
What did they say?
If you are within 120 days of purchase (I think we are about 105 days into 2026) you should be able to start a charge back with your payment source. Did you use a debit or credit card to pay?