I created an eBay account and bought an item, today I got indefinitely suspended

A useful first step, since eBay is in California, is to exercise your California &quot;right to know&quot; right to obtain copies of all information eBay has on you.[1] Ebay has a procedure for this, as they are required to.[2][3] It doesn&#x27;t require a login. That should yield more information.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oag.ca.gov&#x2F;privacy&#x2F;ccpa#sectionc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oag.ca.gov&#x2F;privacy&#x2F;ccpa#sectionc</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ebayinc.com&#x2F;company&#x2F;privacy-center&#x2F;privacy-notice&#x2F;state-privacy-disclosures&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ebayinc.com&#x2F;company&#x2F;privacy-center&#x2F;privacy-notic...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ocswf.ebay.com&#x2F;privacy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ocswf.ebay.com&#x2F;privacy</a>

I&#x27;ve had an eBay account for over 20 years. I stopped using it a few years ago, then sometime in 2022 I decided to sell something, so I logged in and posted my item. The next day, eBay sent me an email saying that my account was suspended. I tried to login, and sure enough, locked out. I just left it alone; I was pretty much already done with eBay anyway. I did nothing. Well, out of curiosity, a few months later, I tried to login to my eBay account again, and it worked fine. I was able to list items for sale again. The message telling me that my account was suspended was still in my eBay Inbox, but I never received any sort of explanation. The whole experience was pretty lame.<p>My guess is that since the account was idle for a few years, then the account suddenly tried selling something, so the algorithms detected this as potential fraud. That sorta makes sense. My beef, really, is that the account was suspended with no explanation and no way to &quot;unsuspend&quot; it, but it &quot;unsuspended&quot; itself, like by magic. Weird.

I had a fun experience too last year. After not using my account for ages I sold a few items. Was sceptical because unlike in the old days, ebay would relay the money now and keep it a few days.<p>However, everything worked fine, got my money, except that there was this one item where the buyer just didn&#x27;t pay. When I contacted him after a week they said they&#x27;re traveling and would pay a week later, so this repeated for a while until I finally have up. So I wanted to cancel the transaction, but it turned out you can only do this within 30 days. The FAQ just states after that, I should resolve the issue with the buyer. According to them, they also didn&#x27;t have an option to cancel. So I had this open transaction in my ebay profile which I could only mark as payed for, but not remove in any way. Two months later it was still there. I logged in just now to check, and it is finally gone.<p>Ebay is full of these half-baked workflows and broken functions. It is mind boggling how even today there still seems to be at least three different UI styles, depending on what part of the site you interact with. One &quot;modern&quot; theme that is very flat, has no borders around anything, then a somewhat older one with more boxes and lines and smaller margins, and yet another one that looks even older.<p>Oh and now that I think of it, I have one stored search in my account that I cannot delete. Everytime I do and refresh the page, it is back again.

The reminds me of an incident that made me (kind of unfairly) boycott Bed Bath and Beyond for the last few years -- I lost my wallet and didn&#x27;t have credit cards for a bit, and when I tried to pay at BB&amp;B with a check, they used a machine that told them I was too much of a risk, though I had an 800+ credit rating and thousands in my checking account. I complained and researched and eventually realized that basically all retailers use this check verification system that uses AI that considers your checks too great a risk if you don&#x27;t normally pay by check -- so the idea that you can use a check in an emergency is really an idea from the last century. This bad decision by eBay seems like the same sort of thing -- machine learning teaches the AI that people who don&#x27;t regularly buy and sell are far more risky than people who do (which of course they are), so new or occasional buyers&#x2F;sellers look like a huge risk, and get randomly bounced.

This happened to me too, just last year.<p>I had an old eBay account, about fifteen years old, but I forgot even the email it was registered to, so I made a new one. Then I bought a small item I wanted, a watch strap for 20$. It had arrived and was exactly what was advertised. Cool, I thought.<p>Two months passed, and out of the blue my account got banned for “risk to the community” reasons. During these two months I did literally nothing on eBay, didn’t even visit the website at all. The seller didn’t contact me later, but left me a good feedback after my purchase. Like, what is this I don’t even vOv<p>The email about account termination said that I could appeal it, but eBay’s support portal didn’t have any links to account termination appeal process or form or contact. I tried to contact support for some other reason, chatted with what seemed to be humans, who transferred my “case” between them several times and in the end told me, in short, that “we can’t tell you what you did wrong and we will not unban you because risk things”. Weird and a little sad.

In 2014 I purchased my first phone, via eBay. Its GPS unit was basically nonfunctional (twice I left it trying to get a fix in near-optimal conditions for more than half an hour, and the best it managed was observing two satellites), which was important for me at the time (I had resisted getting a phone for years and was only finally getting one because I was going to be out in unfamiliar wilds for a few weeks). I returned the phone. The seller denied receiving it. PayPal’s vaunted Buyer Protection rejected my claim. So I ended up $150 out of pocket.<p>(Yes, this is somewhat irrelevant here. But I haven’t ever grumbled about this incident and this brought it to mind, as another case of the powerlessness of the individual against a Machine.)

As absurd as that story is, it&#x27;s not as bad as some of the shadowbans some companies do. I have an old instagram account that I didn&#x27;t use for a long time, and recently I logged in because I met a local musician and wanted to add her.<p>Anything I try to do, I&#x27;m told &quot;Try Again Later We restrict certain activity to protect our community.&quot;<p>I have validated my phone number, the account is in my actual name, and I have provided current photos, etc. My understanding is that this is a shadowban. Why? Who knows. There&#x27;s no support.<p>Most amazingly, there are people who have followed me but I cannot follow them back. Same &quot;Try again later&quot;.<p>I really hope these companies die. But it&#x27;s really a shame that the executives who make the decisions to run them like this don&#x27;t also suffer financially. They always walk away with a golden parachute. I don&#x27;t believe in hell, but if there is one I hope they get to explore it.

I tried to sell on Amazon, account + all accounts with same phone number were suspended before any interaction.<p>We need some external arbitration if the company has a defining market share. Hope the EU tackles this next.

&gt; rafaelconde: Are you a person or a bot?<p>&gt; Kyla: you are currently talking with a live support<p>That did not answer the question!

I&#x27;ve said this for years: Online platforms beyond a certain size need to comply with some form of due process regulation.<p>If thousands or even millions of people are making a living in your ecosystem, you shouldn&#x27;t be able to ruin their livelihoods arbitrarily.<p>This is usually done by underpaid and shockingly untrained workers doing rushed reviews of a profile and clicking the nuke button without remorse or consequence.

Not mentioned here is that ebay processes making these decisions, including bots and support, may be using external signals to make these decisions.<p>Have you ever caused them trouble when using the PayPal account you connected to your eBay accounts? How about with any of any of eBay’s (many) subsidiaries?<p>Can your email or any other personal info provided to eBay be linked to risky activity (from their perspective) if eBay uses a service to analyze that risk?<p>This is not to say eBay is correct or justified in blocking your account. But just noting that it’s not as simple as: 1. makes account 2. Buy product 3. Banned. — They have other signals available as well.

Weird, does he say what the item was anywhere? I wonder if there are some things that are technically allowed but trigger fraud flags when newly created accounts buy them with certain payment providers. Either way, terrible customer service...

I find it extremely strange that a company would encourage a credit card dispute. Wouldn&#x27;t that affect the standing of eBay with credit card processors?

&gt; If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.<p>As we become numerous (and our access to eachother grows) we also become more expendable. For every person they lockout there is 10 more signing up. Just wait till not only is the AI making the decision, but negotiating with it is the only remedy (no humans involved). I predict one of the next great atrocities, like the authoritarian ones of the 20th century, will actually be from a nameless faceless entity hooked up to a decision point that leads to life or death for individuals. It probably will be somewhat subtle, like maybe a decision about sustenance<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;quotes&#x2F;9402-if-you-want-a-picture-of-the-future-imagine-a" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;quotes&#x2F;9402-if-you-want-a-picture-...</a>

Someone in the Twitter replies astutely asked why the graphic shows &#x27;Kyla&#x27;s side of the chat, since every messaging app places the owner&#x27;s text on the right hand side, and the respondent&#x27;s on the left. I just logged into eBay and it&#x27;s the same there - suggesting that this entire exchange is faked.

Sounds exactly like what happened with me and PayPal (guess they still share that).<p>Transferred a few hundred bucks to a PayPal account I hadn&#x27;t used in a while. Got banned with no option for reinstatement or explanation. They basically just kept my money and said there was nothing I could do about it kthxbai.<p>I understand verification for anything flagged as risky. I hadn&#x27;t used the account in years so I can see why it might show up that way. But no, there&#x27;s no way to verify my identity or speak with anyone who can tell me anything. That money just went poof (for me at least).

I had the same thing happen to me. I signed up to ebay for the first time, sold a single item before I had everything filled out (I was surprised at how fast my inventory moved). I couldn&#x27;t enter in my payment information (Chase Bank) and my SSN wouldn&#x27;t validate on their website for whatever reason. In fact, it seems like I am in this predicament because the website wouldn&#x27;t function properly. Now I am out the several thousand dollars for the inventory I moved and I have no course of reconciliation. Any attempts at customer service end up in useless call centers who &quot;cannot help me as we need to reduce fraud in their marketplace&quot;. Fraud? I sold and shipped the item. They must need money so bad they took mine.

&quot;Once again this is Maria Kyla.&quot; - just in case anyone had any doubts. For some reason the mere tone of the support person&#x27;s communication makes me think of chinese eBay&#x2F;Ali-X retailers&#x27; made-up names used in support requests in order to appear more appealing and &quot;familiar&quot; to western customers. During my 7-8 years of buying stuff off of AliExpress I&#x27;ve been on the thankful receiving end of support from &quot;Windy&quot; (Wendy), &quot;Marry&quot; (Mary), &quot;Magret&quot; (Margaret) and &quot;Amily&quot; (Emily) to name just a few.

Ebay is terrible.<p>I once sold a nice (and expensive) smartphone on ebay. The buyer complained that it did not arrive as described. The phone was fine, but whatever, I thought ebay would just refund the payment and have the buyer return the phone, right? Nope, ebay refunded the buyer and let them keep my phone! No recourse... nothing. Ebay let the buyer steal my phone!

I am able to buy, but not able to sell.<p>eBay say I am connected to a dodgy account that was last active years ago. I am not connected to it - but must be some IP match or fingerprint from shared office or the like.<p>Zero ability to feedback or get anywhere from eBay.<p>The logic is rubbish as well, I am dodgy so stop me from selling... but fine to buy?! How?!<p>eBay - sort your shit out.

eBay is a master class on how to get worse every year.<p>I used to sell there, but it&#x27;s just so hostile now, to both buyers and sellers. Particularly sellers, though.

&gt; careful deliberation and investigation<p>After 2m. Lol.

Here’s what happens:<p><pre><code> 1. Service launches 2. They get loaded with scams 3. They implement safety mechanism 4. Repeat cat and mouse game until the list of “if&#x2F;else ban” reaches the distance between moon and earth </code></pre> Basically all of these transactional companies lock themselves into corners and make life hell for everyone.<p>It happened with PayPal, it happens with eBay and it’s starting to happen with Stripe.

They normally do that if they think you have another ebay account.<p>Are you sure you didn&#x27;t have an account from years ago somewhere?<p>If they have any evidence of you having two accounts, they will ban all except the oldest one. And they will refuse to tell you this.<p>If you have a father&#x2F;mother with an identical name (happens frequently in some communities), then you have to share an account with your father&#x2F;mother to not hit this restriction.

I had an account on a popular gaming platform banned for fraud. Fortunately, I knew devs on the team, and they dug into it and found a bug. Account unbanned.<p>Meanwhile, support wouldn&#x27;t tell me anything. Final suspension, we will tell you nothing, there is no more information, etc.<p>I have a very dim view of this type of filtering. If it&#x27;s a bug in eBay&#x27;s systems, they will never fix it.

Considering that eBay actually forbids sellers to sell the same unique item outside of eBay when it is listed on eBay then it is a very concerning behavior. In this case it looks to me that the person on the eBay side got somehow offended by the tone of replies and wanted to have revenge.

Twitter isn&#x27;t much different. Create new account, make a first post, banned. They want your phone number or to solve a puzzle, I did neither and uninstalled. Not as extreme as that chat support or lack thereof but it seems to be a trend.

I&#x27;ve had my eBay account suspended two or three times. All of them was because of suspicious activity in that I was using a VPN. I had to connect with someone on their customer support team to get it unlocked. I guess that&#x27;s understandable if someone else using the same IP address is doing something malicious, but I think this could all be avoided if they set up sane 2FA measures.<p>Just yesterday I logged in and it prompted me to choose how to receive a code - email or SMS. I chose email, received the code then entered. Then, they told me I had to authenticate again via SMS.<p>I really wish they would implement standard software based TOTP so I could use something like Aegis or passOTP.

I had a similar experience with DeepL recently. I made a personal account using their free plan to try out their API. My account was banned before even completing the signup flow, and customer support had no details they could provide me.

Ebay is going down hill- I recently foolishly purchased a too cheap item, and then did more research and saw it was a fraudulent listing. I contacted ebay support, they told me to contact the seller as they were not the a tual seller and “could not cancel it”, and that if it was fraud I should use their reporting system. I did, they quickly removed the item, but STILL REFUSED TO REFUND ME - I have an email from their fraud team alerting me that the listing was fraudulent, but they are happy to keep holding my money for another 7 days, in case the fraudulent item actually ships… insanity

Completely insane. I found recently when I tried to make a new twitter account to tweet at a local customer support account that I was immediately suspended. I didn&#x27;t post anything incendiary or rude.<p>My theory is that a lot of these sites have become so saturated that most people who are going to sign up already have, and the vast majority of new signups are all spam accounts. So the companies respond by making it more and more difficult to make a new account. The irony is that there is almost certainly another team at the company, if not multiple, dedicated to getting new user signups.

I had the same experience buying a charger for my razer. I created an account to buy this very specific charger from a Chinese seller and my account was immediately closed a few hours later. After constant back and forth with their customer service, they basically said that my account was permanently banned from using their service and that I wouldn&#x27;t be able to use eBay ever again. I kept asking what I did wrong and they wouldn&#x27;t tell me. The representative that I was speaking to even knew that I did nothing wrong and was telling me that they were sorry because it was beyond their control and that their manager was telling them not to pursue the matter any further because they themselves could get into trouble.<p>Fast forward about two years after the incident, I randomly remembered it and decided to ring up their customer service to see if they&#x27;d unban my account. The customer service rep unbanned with no problem and when I asked what the issue was, they told me that they sometimes ban new accounts with suspicious activity and that fresh new accounts have a very high chance of committing some sort of fraud.<p>While it&#x27;s nice that I got unbanned after two years, I will never be using eBay ever again if I can help it. Even if they offer the cheapest price on a product, I will purposefully pay more elsewhere.

I&#x27;m not sure what happened, but I make sure to not use VPN because a lot of e-commerce website will ban you if your IP is coming from VPN. Or it could simply be that the IP address happens to be on a blacklist, probably because someone was using that IP address for doing something fishy (which sucks even more since we most likely share IP address which is rotated by ISP). Or it could be geographical issue... I remember I couldn&#x27;t even load Homedepot.com from oversea, as homedepot web server was blocking the entire country for hacking.

I signed up using my real details and a few days later I got an email saying I was banned for life for suspicious activity. They wouldn&#x27;t explain why, just that this decision was irreversible.

Something similar happened to me with Twitter way back in the day, maybe 2016 or 2017? I made an account, followed some famous people, and then got an email saying my account was suspended and the only way to unlock it was to scan my drivers license and send it to them. Since there&#x27;s no way I&#x27;m providing that to twitter, I just abandoned it, maybe a bookmark folder and some bookmarks, and that&#x27;s that.<p>The fraud algorithms at all of these sites are very sensitive and you can be locked out of a service for literally no reason.

Exact conversation I had with support after they suspended me after I sold something for the first time, but before I mailed the item. Its like they just randomly permanently suspend people.

The support questions seemed interested in the account&#x27;s address. I wonder if that address was in a restricted country, known mail forwarding vendor, or PO Box?<p>To be clear, I think the way this was handled and tech company&#x27;s whole &quot;we cannot tell you why&quot; stuff is unacceptable. But typically we can make a fairly reasonable guess why they might restrict the account, we just need more information (e.g. VPN? What was the item? Is your address unusual? PayPal account&#x27;s history?).

&gt;&gt;Thank you for choosing eBay<p>&gt;&gt;Take care bye<p>&gt;&gt;&gt;I am sorry it was not appealed.~Olga<p>I love it, it&#x27;s like a Monty Python Movie :)

I opened an eBay account and sold an item, buyer immediately canceled. eBay asked me to add a bank account again (it was already registered) even though the money was still held by eBay. Website would not let me add the bank account so eBay told the buyer to open a case, which was immediately settled in his favour, as expected. A few days later, on Christmas day, they banned me from selling. But kindly allowed me to continue buying. Fuck eBay.

I wonder what it was that he purchased?<p>I am sad that eBay deletes inactive accounts. I lost all the historic feedback I had because I didn&#x27;t go back in within 30 days of notice. I don&#x27;t know that it&#x27;s necessary to do that. How much disk space could a list of account names take up in an indexed database table?

It&#x27;s not you, it&#x27;s them. I&#x27;ve been &#x27;indefinitely suspended&#x27; thrice from eBay. Whenever their extra secret suspension metrics DB gets an update, your suspension reasons are discarded, and you can appeal to reopen your business. I&#x27;ve found &#x27;indefinitely&#x27; is about 4 years.

Twitter has a similar on-boarding process.

Slightly off-topic, but I&#x27;m curious if anyone knows the best established way to accept payment for items sold+shipped through sites like ebay.<p>I&#x27;ve heard enough horror stories from sellers claiming they&#x27;d shipped items only to have the buyer falsely claim it never arrived or wasn&#x27;t what was advertised to get reimbursed&#x2F;chargeback, and never return the item or return a box of rocks.<p>This has prevented me from selling anything online outside of in-person CL sales for over a decade now. Ages ago I sold many things on ebay that were shipped without difficulty, accepting paypal, none of this fuckery, but times have changed.<p>Is there a safe way to do this sort of business as a seller today? It really sucks to not have access to the broader market for selling some niche items, esp. in my rural region w&#x2F;low population density.

I had a similar situation happen with Mercari last year. I bought some used audio equipment and 30 minutes later my account was terminated for &quot;prohibited items or conduct&quot;. I still wonder every now and then what part of the listing triggered the banhammer. Guess who never used Mercari again?

I&#x27;m curious about the background here. It certainly seems bad, but I could imagine quite a few scenarios where this is expected. One would be making a second account to bid on your own item.<p>I want to make the point, I&#x27;m not accusing him. I just am curious about the background.

Perhaps his name matched someone on a US government sanctions list? eBay is a US company after all.

This definitely is a data privacy issue. They collect your data any they use it in some mathematical model to assess risk with some poorly thought out proxy, and boom: a bunch of people get falsely classified as risks to the platform. It&#x27;s like the value added model for teachers, and Cathy O&#x27;Neil addresses this in Weapons of Math Destruction.

This is like playing Elder Scrolls… lol<p>&quot;Let&#x27;s talk about something else.&quot; &quot;Goodbye&quot;

Same thing happened to me as a seller. I sold a single Nintendo Switch game for a very normal price ($30, used). I delivered the item on-time and with tracking. My account was suspended forever with no chance for review.

I had something similar happen to my account as well. I can&#x27;t bid in any auctions on eBay though I can do Buy It Now. The restriction came out of nowhere and has been on my account for years with no explanation.

I have had a similar experience, submitted an auction bid once but for some reason couldn&#x27;t log back in into my ebay account for a week, looks like e-bay wasn&#x27;t interested in getting my money :).

I&#x27;ve had a similar problem - signed up, provided all real details (they actually do a soft credit-check at least in the UK so that should&#x27;ve succeeded) and verified a phone number, listed some low-value specialised computer hardware that&#x27;s definitely not a good bait for scammers (you&#x27;d be lucky if you got any buyers at all, so a scammer would definitely not list something like that if their objective was to scam) and yet the next day all the items were gone and account suspended.

I&#x27;ve had this happen twice to me. Once when I started selling things from a long standing account. Again when I was selling and they just closed it.<p>I got exactly the same lack of explanation each time. T&amp;C&#x27;s say that I can&#x27;t open another account but my new accounts have the same address associated with it.<p>Crappy situation when it&#x27;s your business, although you are allowed to have multiple accounts.

The same happened to my girlfriend with her EA account: just created it and the next day it was suspended, without any explanations or review options.

Same thing happened to me with Activision.<p>Found out one day my account was randomly banned from playing Warzone 2.0 with absolutely no way to get it unbanned.

Yes but he doesn&#x27;t say what he was trying to buy. Drugs? Guns? Money laundering? There&#x27;s got to be more to the story here...

This is strange. I&#x27;ve had an eBay account since 1999. I&#x27;ve used it very irregularly over the years - sometimes I&#x27;m buying things regularly, occasionally I&#x27;ll do a &quot;burst&quot; of selling for a few months, then go for years without selling anything. I&#x27;ve never seen anything remotely like this suspension.

I&#x27;m honestly looking forwards to the EU digital identity. From both the user and the developer side I don&#x27;t want to deal with a process where one can either spawn a million accounts in 5 minutes or be subjected to validation processes full of false positives and negatives.<p>Investing in startups with many free users who might not be people?

Can anyone offer insights into why the eBay website is so bad for sellers? They&#x27;re a multibillion dollar business. It doesn&#x27;t just <i>look</i> old, there are many basic missing features, integrations are feeble (such as the recently discontinued Shopify connection), and there are so many stupid workarounds required.

My complete guess is that their system thought you looked like the seller trying to artificially inflate their auction.<p>A quick Google search says that as of 2021, only 12% of products are sold by auction. They&#x27;re so obsessed with competing with Amazon with the &quot;buy it now&quot; system that auctions may be an afterthought.

Etsy should eat eBay&#x27;s lunch. eBay&#x27;s site is pretty cruddy, they seem to think it&#x27;s cool that sellers inflate shipping costs (often to hilarious extents), and now it&#x27;s become easy to get stuck in some kind of authentication loop or even get suspended.

Speculating but when any online companies do this, that usually is because the users IP or Phone Number are marked as “unsafe” by some data providers. As both of them can be recycled, it puts customers in weird situations like this

that&#x27;s super lucky<p>I have never been able to buy anything from eBay successfully, either it&#x27;s fraud, or customs-postage get so fucking idiotic they demand more in fees than the cost of the item... never again, not like it ever worked for me

Happened to me, too. Now I just use Ebay as a guest when I need to, otherwise avoid. I got told it was irreversible after I: created an account, bought some dc&#x2F;dc converter modules for like 10$.

I wonder if there’s some perverse incentive to block accounts and there’s a “# accounts suspended for fraud” dashboard somewhere. Suspending new accounts is likely the easiest because they put up the least fuss.

I guess there may be a thriving market of second-hand accounts with good reputation, or &quot;will buy or sell your shit for a percentage&quot; services, with helpful support like this.

…and BigTech™ continues to DOS itself out of existence, fine by me!

<p><pre><code> Hacker News new | threads | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit flancian (327) | logout</code></pre> I created an eBay account and bought an item, today I got indefinitely suspended (twitter.com&#x2F;rafahari) 335 points by tommoor 4 hours ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 209 comments Hacker News new | threads | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit flancian (327) | logout I created an eBay account and bought an item, today I got indefinitely suspended (twitter.com&#x2F;rafahari) 335 points by tommoor 4 hours ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 209 comments

It is basically up to eBay whom they do business with.<p>... of course, wasting potential new customers&#x27; time by having them set up an account and then cancelling it is a bad user experience.

It&#x27;s been about a decade since last time I bought on eBay, for me trust is very important and I don&#x27;t trust eBay anymore since then.

&quot;Careful deliberation&quot; was 2 minutes? lol

I dunno about the reasons, but this chat session looks unutterably dumb.<p>Why ask those questions if they have no bearing on the result?

Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long, long time. Does anyone here find eBay useful anymore?

In the war Humans vs Bots, the Bots won and they have taken our place.

Whenever I chat (on ebay or on my phone), my messages are on the right, and the other persons messages are on the left.<p>My question therefore is, &quot;Is this a real situation and a real chat?&quot; There is really no information given.

My guess is that OP isn&#x27;t giving us all the details. Most likely he&#x27;s engaged in some untoward behavior elsewhere and has ended up on a high risk list.<p>These services are actually really great at reducing fraud for sellers.

&gt; Thanks for choosing eBay

People are still using eBay?

the only thing worth using at ebay are the tiny classified ads

im going to guess you were using a vpn.

eBay must be run by Reddit mods

Blacklist?