This is only sort of related to the original post here but I felt I'd add a buyer's perspective to what I feel was the sort of the reverse of what happened above.
As a buyer about 8 months ago. I had made a purchase from a seller I've dealt with in the past, we werfe both here in the states.
A matter of minutes after I paid for the order I get an email saying eBay has cancelled the sale, the seller is no longer a registered user, and if I already have paid, to wait and see, chances are the item will arrive. It never did, the seller was gone, (after 12 years), and my order never arrived. eBay made me wait for a refund, the seller obviously never responded since their account was gone and likely they weren't getting any of the ebay communications I was being forced to send to qualify for a refund.
I got my money back after several months, but never got an full explanation as to what went on. They were a seller with perfect feedback, I had bought from them for years then all of a sudden they were gone. I contacted the seller through another site they sell on but got no answer by email, I finally called a number I had from years ago just to see if they were still in business and they were. The story was that their account got hacked or hijacked. They said they had quit selling on eBay and were only using Amazon, but left the account dormant just in case, then someone began using it to sell items by reviving some of their past ads and items, and of course they didn't know about it and nothing was ever shipped. It turned out that they only found out about it after eBay started issuing refunds for items they didn't sell. They were somehow getting charge backs on items they didn't list or sell.
That didn't add up to me because if someone hijacked their account, and were able to collect the ill gotten funds, wouldn't that mean the banking info on that account had been changed as well?
(To make it worse, a month after this all went down, I find a double charge on my CC bill, after I was refunded, about three weeks later, I got charged again for the same initial order, that time the bank got it refunded after about a week and some fraud forms I had to fill out). The charges came from somewhere in NV, the original seller was in TX, and I have no clue where the original payment was sent too through PP.
A simply $90 transaction turned into a four month mess and to this day I don't know who or what was at fault. What confused me was that I had paid via CC through PP in eBay checkout, how did whom ever hacked their account get my CC number? (The bank seemed to think it was likely unrelated and that it may have been a breach in security with the CC company itself). I'll never know for sure about that part.
The company I was dealing with was a distributor who only sold through eBay, I would email in an order, they'd give me a total and an item number and I'd go to eBay and hit BIN. This was fairly common with various suppliers for a long time, they felt they and I were better protected dealing through eBay.
While I did come out of it without any losses other than time and a few deadlines, it did actually lead to me buying direct from the manufacturer now and not through a distributor. Its cheaper but I have to buy and store more product than I'd prefer to with a bit more waste due to bulk packaging.
From what I was told by the seller after the fact the whole mess cost them a ton of money because they hadn't gotten the money back that eBay had yanked back through PP for items they didn't actually sell to customers they didn't know anything about.
I realize that this is all long over with and in the past and I no longer deal with that seller by no fault of their own, but I bring this up because as a part time seller on another account, I couldn't figure out how something like that could even happen and how to protect myself from something like that since I have several 'dormant' accounts, two of which I'm contemplating starting back up.
