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Your eBay account has been suspended

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Re: Your eBay account has been suspended

#131

Post by nikkwong »

dylan604 wrote: post #127
nikkwong wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks; unfortunately I think it's only $10,000 in washington state.

I had just posted up thread a recommendation about contacting your state AG about this kind of situation. However, if you're in Washington State, the state AG might not be too interested in taking on a large employer in their state. Or maybe they'd be even more motivated riding the anti-AMZN wave.???

Not only a large employer; the largest. What an unfortunate coincidence for me then. The anti-amazon sentiment is real, maybe I should wait for their next large PR fiasco and try to ride that wave. Thanks for the tip, I will still pursue it and see if it goes anywhere.

Re: Your eBay account has been suspended

#132

Post by nate_meurer »

patio11 wrote: post #90
patio11 wrote: post #87

Sorry that happened to you. As some HNers know I have a long-time hobby of working customer service state machines, and I'm going to take the liberty of writing the most effective resolution path here for the general case, in case you or other HNers ever need to solve this. Live chat is probably staffed by external agents and they may have the least ability in the various tiers of the CS hierarchy to help with proble…

An aside for HNers, which I write as someone who had his first job in customer service: please remember, when interacting with customer service agents (and the various ops folks at companies that hire from very similar talent pools), that you (very likely, if you are on HN) are in a ridiculously fortunate position in life relative to the customer service agent, and that they did not write the state machine that made…

Thanks for this addendum, this is important. I'd also emphasize the practical effect that our rudeness/friendliness can have. I experienced this last year when we were trying to get care for my father after he was nearly killed by COVID. The hospital wanted to send him home before he was able to care for himself, and we wanted the hospital to discharge him to rehab instead.

My sister's initial strategy was to go full Karen and treat the patient care coordinator like she was my sister's employee. She adapted to the coordinator's natural reticence with increasing bitchiness, and quickly got her calls screened.

My father on the verge of getting kicked out while still in dire need of care, I called the same coordinator, explained our dilemma in detail, said I don't know what to do, and asked for her help. My magic spell was simply to treat the coordinator as a resourceful and intelligent person who was in a position to help me, and ask her plainly for help. That's it. The coordinator told me she'd see what she could do, and then spent the next two days searching for a solution. When she found a way to get my dad into rehab for a few days, I told her she was my hero.

I try to treat even the most obviously external and powerless customer service reps with the same plain respect as that patient coordinator, and I'm often surprised by how far it gets me.

Re: Your eBay account has been suspended

#133

Post by serf »

patio11 wrote: post #90
patio11 wrote: post #87

Sorry that happened to you. As some HNers know I have a long-time hobby of working customer service state machines, and I'm going to take the liberty of writing the most effective resolution path here for the general case, in case you or other HNers ever need to solve this. Live chat is probably staffed by external agents and they may have the least ability in the various tiers of the CS hierarchy to help with proble…

An aside for HNers, which I write as someone who had his first job in customer service: please remember, when interacting with customer service agents (and the various ops folks at companies that hire from very similar talent pools), that you (very likely, if you are on HN) are in a ridiculously fortunate position in life relative to the customer service agent, and that they did not write the state machine that made…

>please remember, when interacting with customer service agents (and the various ops folks at companies that hire from very similar talent pools), that you (very likely, if you are on HN) are in a ridiculously fortunate position in life relative to the customer service agent

I agree with the sentiment that 'you attract more flies with honey than vinegar' with regards to customer service folks, but disagree with the trope that HN-users (or computer-job-people in general) are somehow privileged and in a fortunate place in life simply due to where they hang out online or the categorization of work they do.

I also disagree with the stereotyping of customer service workers as disadvantaged.

simply put : I disagree with uninformed characterizations. I don't know anything about the life of the customer service worker that I need to call, and they don't know anything about mine; to assume anything with what little we both know about each other is a recipe for inaccurate profiling.

"try walking a mile in my shoes" isn't a literal request to learn more about the person you're judging, it's advice that suggests that 'the other' is ultimately unknowable and that presumption is worthless.

judge their job and the quality of that, maybe some accurate generalizations can be made about their job; I can agree that most customer-service work is low quality, grueling, and sometimes abusive.

Don't extrapolate judgements borne from work presumptions into 'total life quality & stature'; a person is more and has more than the work they do.

Re: Your eBay account has been suspended

#134

Post by tluyben2 »

omgmajk wrote: post #115
tluyben2 wrote: post #5

Because my accounts are so old and I have so many of them, I get a message regularly saying that my account for service xyz has been suspended. When I contact them there a) never is a good reason for why it was done (hint; it is usually because they started using or recently updated some AI fraud detection service) b) small companies easily restore your account; with big ones it is usually game over. Ebay (and Paypal…

I wonder what would cause an account to be unclosable, never heard of such a thing.

Your guess is as good as mine, but some kind of logical deadlock and no support person (managers included) is allowed to resolve it?

Re: Your eBay account has been suspended

#135

Post by tluyben2 »

dangle1 wrote: post #61
tluyben2 wrote: post #5

Because my accounts are so old and I have so many of them, I get a message regularly saying that my account for service xyz has been suspended. When I contact them there a) never is a good reason for why it was done (hint; it is usually because they started using or recently updated some AI fraud detection service) b) small companies easily restore your account; with big ones it is usually game over. Ebay (and Paypal…

That's interesting, I wonder if I have an 'uncloseable' PayPal account, since it started as an x.com account in '99 when they were giving people $20 to open one.

Mine is a business account which was migrated from a personal account from over 2 decades ago; I tried to close it for over a year.

Re: Your eBay account has been suspended

#136

Post by b3nji »

I had the same thing happen a few years ago with PayPal, it was completely out of the blue. I've been a user for over a decade.

There was no route of recourse I could follow, that was it, the end, done.

There was nothing out of the ordinary I was buying from eBay, I had a few subscriptions via PayPal, and didn't really sell things on eBay either.

I feel it was an algorithm fail, a bit of code that arbitrarily decides to delete you off the system.

Maybe something we can look forward to more of if we aren't careful?

Re: Your eBay account has been suspended

#137

Post by GoodbyeMrChips »

> We need some sort of 'due process' required of companies that operate above a certain scale.

The GDPR is your friend.

It gives you the right to appeal against automated decision making. A human must look into and review the decision to suspend your account if you request it. The human must be easily contactable and able to make a decision based on the facts.

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/

Article 22: "The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her."

Re: Your eBay account has been suspended

#138

Post by tinus_hn »

tluyben2 wrote: post #5

Because my accounts are so old and I have so many of them, I get a message regularly saying that my account for service xyz has been suspended. When I contact them there a) never is a good reason for why it was done (hint; it is usually because they started using or recently updated some AI fraud detection service) b) small companies easily restore your account; with big ones it is usually game over. Ebay (and Paypal…

Didn’t PayPal start charging you for maintaining an account?

Re: Your eBay account has been suspended

#139

Post by Z37K »

The exact same thing thing happened to me last night. Account suspended with a perfect but low volume selling record. I haven't used it for a year.

Received an email this morning saying it has been reinstated. Either way it did make me waste my time removing my cards from PayPal and emptying that account. The reason I stopped using them is that they appeared to manually use the direct debit to take money from my account (and more than they should have) after I'd logically won against a fraudulent return according to their policies last year.

My last action was to make a SAR which showed again that it was closed against their policies.

Knowing eBay at first I thought they may have looked into the case and wanted to cover their backs. I wouldn't be too surprised now if it was just a bug.

Re: Your eBay account has been suspended

#140

Post by tyingq »

nikkwong wrote: post #125
tyingq wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check the limits for small claims court in your state. Some of them go up to 20-25k.

Thanks; unfortunately I think it's only $10,000 in washington state.

I wonder if you could file different small claims suits for logical parts of the money they are holding, like one for Q1 earned revenue, another for Q2 earned revenue, etc.

That would be more leverage in that they would have to send a lawyer to every one of them.

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