I am a new buyer and my account was suspended for no reason.

per979596

per979596

Member
May 27, 2020
14
4
#1
Hello!



I joined eBay a few days ago as I needed to buy a phone to replace the one I accidentally smashed. :sad: Amazon is often more expensive. I found a few phones I liked and made some bids (was outbid). I occasionally contacted sellers to ask for more details about certain phones. Most sellers were quick and friendly. :smile: A couple of days ago I made an offer on a phone which was originally accepted while I was asleep but by the time I had woken up was no longer available. Yesterday or the day before I found another seller selling the phone I wanted. I bargained with the seller and yesterday at about 3 pm s/he accepted my offer. Having already read rules about offers I knew I had to pay within two days. As I don't have a permanent credit or debit card I planned to buy a prepaid Visa or MasterCard earlier today before three and pay. However, when I logged in to my account around 11 am I saw the message that my account had been suspended. The weird thing was that the message did not mention why I was suspended and furthermore said I could not appeal. Here is the full text of the message.
Screenshot_2020-05-27 Suspension.png

I did a little research about suspended accounts and discovered that there was a phone number to call. It wasn't working so I used eBay's live chat. The representative was very friendly and transferred my inquiry about my suspension to the account team. She said that I would receive an e-mail from them. A couple of hours later I did. It was another very vague e-mail. Here is the text.

Screenshot_2020-05-27.png


Did I do anything wrong? Also what part of eBay's policy would prevent them from letting me know why my account was suspended? Do I have any reasonable options besides being forced to leave eBay for life?


I don't know if it will help you try to determine why my account may have been suspended but I will add that I hadn't had a payment option set up yet at the time of the suspension as I still had to get the prepaid card. Also I believe before I was suspended I only logged in on two devices, a spare phone and a laptop.


I hope this can get resolved or I can know what I did wrong because being banned from eBay from life for an unknown reason isn't fun. :sad:​
 
#5
Your profile looks suspicious to eBay. There are a number of unusual combinations regarding your activity there that I understand would trigger a security flag, but there might be more that are not being shared with us here.

I noticed that you are brand new to the PurseForum, and your first posts are on the eBay forum about a phone purchase attempt using prepaid Visas/Mastercards, and you want us to tell you why that might be? Because honestly your behavior here, as well as your username...makes me doubt that you wanted to be a full-fledged member of this forum, and therefore makes me hesitant to share things.

I will only say that as an active member on a different forum, I have assisted in (allegedly) getting innocent new users' accounts unsuspended. They claimed to have successfully made an appeal after receiving the same initial treatment as you had.

And if you are completely innocent, and never had any other eBay accounts before, etc. then I am sorry -- you must understand, though, that to eBay you have the behavioral pattern of a scammer. They are indeed trying to cut down on high-risk new users, electronics being one of the high-fraud categories...catching some innocents in their methodology...but yeah as of now it looks like you seem higher risk to their userbase than it is "worth" to receive your business by keeping your account open.
 
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#6
resplendent said:
Your profile looks suspicious to eBay. There are a number of unusual combinations regarding your activity there that I understand would trigger a security flag, but there might be more that are not being shared with us here.

I noticed that you are brand new to the PurseForum, and your first posts are on the eBay forum about a phone purchase attempt using prepaid Visas/Mastercards, and you want us to tell you why that might be? Because honestly your behavior here, as well as your username...makes me doubt that you wanted to be a full-fledged member of this forum, and therefore makes me hesitant to share things.

I will only say that as an active member on a different forum, I have assisted in (allegedly) getting innocent new users' accounts unsuspended. They claimed to have successfully made an appeal after receiving the same initial treatment as you had.

And if you are completely innocent, and never had any other eBay accounts before, etc. then I am sorry -- you must understand, though, that to eBay you have the behavioral pattern of a scammer. They are indeed trying to cut down on high-risk new users, electronics being one of the high-fraud categories...catching some innocents in their methodology...but yeah as of now it looks like you seem higher risk to their userbase than it is "worth" to receive your business by keeping your account open.
Click to expand...

The reason I wanted to use a prepaid card is because I do not have a credit or debit card. I would use a normal card if I had one but I don't. However, this doesn't have anything to do with my suspension as I hadn't entered a payment method yet. Also I intentionally made my username the same as my eBay username. I apologize if that doesn't seem the best. I have appealed twice and got pretty much the same answer as seen in the second image.

I really appreciate your reply..
 
#7
I doing some more research and I am thinking maybe eBay didn't like my VOIP number. Before I had a phone at all I used Google Voice to call and text. Now that I have (or had) a working phone I always kept the google voice number because it made it easy to text people when my family went on a vacation where there wasn't good service. Because my phone is now broken I used the VOIP number to sign up as it was kind of a hassle to constantly swap my sim card into my brother's flip phone.
Could this part if not the whole story of why my account was flagged?
 
#8
without knowing all the details (like what requests did you make about the other phones) it is impossible to explain what happened.

It does sound like you had a lot of questionable behaviour right off the hop and you had just created an account that had no identifying features to it (no cc, a VOIP number).
 
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#9
I don't know you, I don't know your history, I don't know your IP info, I don't know anything more about you than you've posted here but this is my speculation surrounding the red flags ebay saw in your activity.

  • brand new member
  • no previous buying or selling history
  • multiple bids on high fraud (electronics/smart phone) items
  • separate multiple questions to multiple sellers with additional negotiations
  • untraceable payment method
  • no verifiable banking info
  • your location (IP) might be a common one used in other questionable transactions
While just one or two of the above may not stand out as out of the ordinary, the combination of multiple red flags combined with ebay's algorithms for determining potential fraud are what caused the suspension.

While your potential transaction(s) may be totally legitimate, ebay prefers to err on the side of caution if they sense a problem.
 
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#11
Ok I can see why they could be worried. I had no clue that a VOIP number could have been a problem. I text most of my friends with my VOIP number as it is more convenient. As for my interactions here they are normal as far as I can tell. I can provide screenshots if you want. What happened when I tied to ask about a price one in a PM was that the seller told me to make the offer through the Make Offer button. Being completely new to eBay I didn't you had to do it that way. My other interactions were basic questions about the product.
As for my IP address I have never used a VPN with eBay and I have absolutely no reason to believe that my IP would be blacklisted in anyway. It is a family laptop I am using but I am the first in my family to obtain an eBay account.

Tough luck I guess.
 
#13
caannie said:
I'm curious... How do you make online purchases from Amazon or other sites without debit or credit cards?
Click to expand...
lol, with Amazon gift cards. And sometimes I buy prepaid cards for the rare times when I pay for something online outside of Amazon. I am a college student still living at home so I don't really have many things to pay for. Probably in the next year I will get a credit card.
 
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#14
My account was suspended in March and I received a similar notification. After appealing, the eBay rep basically said he had no clue why I was suspended. I suspect the algorithm erroneously flagged me as a "bad" seller who owed them money because one sentence in the notification urged me to settle my debt. It was weird because I've never sold anything before. They killed "my listings" which were actually the items I had purchased and which luckily were already in the mail. After they restored my account a week later, those listings remained deleted, so I could not leave feedback.
 
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#15
xincinsin said:
My account was suspended in March and I received a similar notification. After appealing, the eBay rep basically said he had no clue why I was suspended. I suspect the algorithm erroneously flagged me as a "bad" seller who owed them money because one sentence in the notification urged me to settle my debt. It was weird because I've never sold anything before. They killed "my listings" which were actually the items I had purchased and which luckily were already in the mail. After they restored my account a week later, those listings remained deleted, so I could not leave feedback.
Click to expand...
That's good you were able to get your account back. After my two unsuccessful appeals where different people sent me what seemed to be mostly a scripted e-mail I have decided to take a break. I will probably try to appeal again before too long and hopefully it will get to someone who realizes that there are mistakes in the system. I was hoping that there might be a number available soon to call as that is much easier and has a higher chance of success.
 
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