I want to make everyone aware of some fraudulent activity on my account that occurred after I purchased an item from a new seller. I have been around for over 10 years on eBay and have had 30,000+ Transactions and this is the first time I have ever seen anything like this. This issue needs to be addressed. I purchased an item from a brand new seller with no feedback. The item was approximately $1000 in value and I completed this purchase a couple hours ago. Well just a few moments ago I received a flurry of emails from eBay. The first claiming I opened a case, which I did not. Then I got another 5-6 emails containing chat logs with eBay that my account supposedly had over the instant chat feature. However, I have not had any conversations with eBay and I am currently awaiting a call back with customer service. As I look into this further it gets crazier. I log on to my eBay account to see what it going on with this item. It is showing that the item I purchased today was marked as delivered the same day. The tracking number the seller provided is to my zipcode but it shows the item was first shipped yesterday before I even purchased the item on eBay. Then I see that not only had a case for "item not received" been opened on this item but that same case had also been marked as CLOSED because the item was supposedly "delivered" and It claimed I had requested it to be closed. When I first saw this I did a little mini freakout. How did the seller have access to my account, did he have my password? After checking my emails and seeing Ebay chat transcripts with the chat log attached I finally figured out what happened. The seller was able to contact Ebay through the "Chat with us" feature to conduct a phishing/social engineering scam on customer service. He chatted with customer service using an "Ebay guest" account. Once in chat he gave them all my information from the order details page; address, name, number and order id to fool customer service in to thinking it was me. Then he asked customer service to open a case for item not received. After the case was opened he went back on his seller account and uploaded a random Fedex tracking number that was for a package that was delivered to my same zipcode into the case. Then he went back to Ebay customer service and again pretended to be me using the same information. Ebay customer service bought it everytime! Well pretending to be me he asked Ebay to close the case because the item was "delivered." This is the only part that tripped him up at first. Ebay's policy was not to close this type of case for 3 days. The first couple reps he spoke with would not close the case. However he kept starting a new chat session with Ebay reps, pretending to be me and eventually found a representative who was able to close the case. Another method he also used was emphasizing that he was in a rush when speaking with customer service. As an update, well typing this out I got ahold of Ebay on the phone and they were able to reverse all this. Thank goodness I noticed the issue right away. My questions is how are there no safeguards by Ebay to protect against this and properly verify the buyers identity in chat? There should be more verification when someone is claiming to be the buyer in a transaction then the information given to the seller from the sale. The instant chat method seems very vulnerable to this type of scam since he doesn't have to talk with someone on the phone I am assuming the account will most likely be banned but this should never been allowed to happen in the first place.
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