I have been an eBay user for over 25 years and have bought and sold over 1000 items. In February I sold a camera lens for $525. eBay confirmed the sale, provided the address in Florida, and said ship in 3 days, which I did as usual. About 10 days later they emailed me and told me to not ship the lens as the buyer was bogus. Of course, the lens had been delivered by then. I called eBay to find out why I had only been paid about $28 of the $545. I spent literally 5 hours on the phone, talked to 9 different people, and was cut off the phone 5 times, having to call back and go up the ladder each time. Finally” Roberto” in Payments told me, “Don’t worry, seller protections is going to cover this, and you’ll get paid in 30 days.” But nothing after 30 days so I called back and, despite the reference number he gave me, they didn’t seem to know anything about it and I spent 3.5 more hours on the phone with multiple people, again getting cut off over and over. At that point I was asking each person their name and made them promise to call me back if I got cut off. Not one of them called me back. I finally got a supervisor in Trust and Safety that basically explained the buyer had set up a store in my name using a VPN in Canada and gave themselves a $1000 coupon, applied it to the ]sale, and put a note on the sale to fool me, “Buyer paid with an eBay discount. This will not affect the funds you will receive - You can withdraw $543.60 on Feb 10 to your bank account ending in 8077 - Ship now.” After explaining how it happened, she put me on hold to connect me to payments again then cut me off. When I called back, they said there was no way to reconnect me to her.
So I called again and talked to “Anna” and she was on the phone with me for another hour and then said she’d call me back the following day at 3pm. As you can guess, she didn’t. So, I called today, and they say they are not responsible and can do nothing about it. This despite it being their responsibility to vet buyers, cull bad players, and make a safe working environment. So, I’m out $525 because they didn’t vet the buyer who hacked them and ran this scam, which one eBay person even admitted they knew about and had seen before and talked about how sophisticated it had become. So, my experience with eBay’s customer service, regardless of the final outcome which I am not happy about, has been awful. I cannot believe a tech company can accidentally lose calls that many times so I must conclude all these delays and lies and cut offs are part of their approach to frustrate folks to the point they give up. I was told so many conflicting things and lied to repeatedly. It took nine hours for them to finally say, sorry we’re not going to do anything for you. So, I will be dropping the 30 or so items I have up now and will no longer be dealing with eBay. I encourage anyone reading this to make their own evaluation on whether they want to end up being treated so poorly by eBay if they run into problems.
